


Enter Ellis

by likehandlingroses



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Allusions to canon suicide attempts, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Depressive Thoughts, Developing Relationship, F/F, Flirting, Friends to Lovers, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, POV Thomas Barrow, Period-Typical Homophobia, Physical Trauma, Psychological Trauma, allusions to canon suicide, conversion therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-12-03
Packaged: 2021-01-24 09:41:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 36,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21336151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likehandlingroses/pseuds/likehandlingroses
Summary: What if Richard Ellis had made his way into Thomas's story before the royal visit in 1927?  (A look at six possibilities).
Relationships: Daisy Mason/Ivy Stuart, Thomas Barrow/Richard Ellis
Comments: 164
Kudos: 361





	1. Teaspoons

**Author's Note:**

> This fic will have six parts--each correlating to one of the six seasons of the show, and what that season might look like with Richard Ellis in it. There'll be a "new" iteration of Richard/Thomas in each part, depending on when Richard Ellis "enters" the scene. 
> 
> This part starts us off with Season 1. I hope you enjoy! This is my first time writing for Downton Abbey, and I'm excited about getting into a new world with my fic writing. 
> 
> (Note: the rating and tags will likely change as we move through the seasons...and if you watch the show, you probably know why!)

**April, 1912**

Thomas caught O’Brien before she could quite reach the landing. 

“Anna said you saw him, then? The new valet?”

O’Brien glanced down both sides of the corridor before answering. “He’s new, all right. I thought they’d hired a hall boy when I first got a look at him…”

And really, what had he been hoping for her to say? Either the new valet would be more impressive than Thomas, or he wouldn’t be...and how could he be expected to stomach either option? 

“Wonderful,” he muttered, edging past O’Brien to start down the stairs for luncheon. Better to get it over and done with, then...

“Don’t act as if it’s not your own fault,” O’Brien hissed on his heels. “I told you not to leave it to chance. Next time, you won’t sit on your hands for so long…”

“Don’t see how there’ll be a next time...” Thomas grumbled. 

“There might be, soon enough.”

She stopped on the stairs before he did, staring down imperiously at him as he turned towards her. 

“How’d you mean?”

Some of the maids had started down, and O’Brien closed the gap between them again. Her voice—however soft-—had a habit of carrying over the clatter of footsteps and the chatter of servants temporarily released from their duties. 

Or perhaps it was only that Thomas had developed a habit of finding its tendrils amidst the chaos. 

“It all depends on how things go for Mr. Ellis as he settles in,” she said. “There’s no way of knowing how it’ll all shake out. Even with you giving him a hand at the start...”

Thomas considered her words before grinning.

“No, there’s no telling how it might go, is there?”

* * *

Mr. Ellis _ was _ young—young enough for Thomas to catch the defensiveness in Carson’s voice as he introduced them to each other. He’d known Thomas wanted the job, the bastard...whatever O’Brien said, it wouldn’t have made any difference, him groveling for it.

Mr. Ellis—who couldn’t be any older than Thomas himself—was proof enough that an outside hire wasn’t a matter of wanting someone more suited for the job. It was a matter of putting _ him _ back into place as quickly as possible. 

It wasn’t Mr. Ellis’s fault, not really. Thomas’s resolution to despise him wasn’t personal—not yet, anyway. But he had pride as well as principles—whatever the rest of them thought—and he wasn’t about to forgive the man for benefitting at his expense. 

But to say Mr. Ellis cut the figure of a _ hall boy_...even in his resentment, Thomas wouldn’t go so far as that. With his height and his bearing, surely he’d been at least a footman at his last place. 

He promised himself he wouldn’t ask, wouldn’t pay Mr. Ellis a jot more attention than required. The trouble—and Thomas was loath to admit it—was that Mr. Ellis drew the eye. It didn’t help that Mr. Ellis had a maddening habit of smiling as Thomas spoke, though never very widely, and never for very long before turning back to whatever fixture in the room they’d been discussing, looking quite pensive again. As if he too had resolved not to bother with Thomas for longer than he needed to. 

Which made Thomas’s own coolness pointless, of course. 

“You were Sir Lawrence’s valet, I take it?” Thomas asked, plastering on a smile and taking a different tack. He paused just long enough to register the doubt in Mr. Ellis’s eyes before barreling forward. “I’m sure you won’t find things too different...you’ll have to get used to the bigger house, that’s true...but that’ll come with time. You mustn’t let it intimidate you, Mr. Ellis. That’s the main thing. You’re trained, and that’s all His Lordship can expect at the start.”

Perhaps Thomas’s wide-eyed, affected innocence was too convincing, for Mr. Ellis appeared unperturbed. 

“I was only half a valet, actually.”

Thomas frowned in the face of another one of Mr. Ellis’s vanishing smiles. “_Half _a valet?” 

“I was only ever properly a footman. The thing is, Mr. Linton—Sir Lawrence’s valet—was shoving most of the fiddly things onto me, by the time I left,” Mr. Ellis said as they both looked over Lord Grantham’s cufflinks. “He drank more than was good for him, though no one would have noticed if it weren’t for the little things he couldn’t manage. Everyone was fond of him otherwise, so I didn’t mind taking it on.” 

Thomas’s spine straightened as Mr. Ellis spoke. 

“Did anyone know about it?” he asked, as if the answer was of no consequence. And it might not be...but it couldn’t hurt to keep such information on hand. 

“Everyone knew he drank too much port if that’s what you mean…” Mr. Ellis said with a laugh. “But the work got done, and no one asks questions about that, do they?”

Thomas moved one of the cufflinks a touch to the left, steeling himself before fixing Mr. Ellis with a stare that he hoped would push Mr. Ellis back into the margins of Thomas’s concerns. 

“But you’ve not worked as a valet before?” he said, trying not to blink in the face of Mr. Ellis’s guileless gaze. “Strictly speaking?”

Another smile, his eyes dropping down to his shoes for a moment. “Not strictly, no. Just what I’ve said, and for the occasional house party. Footmen have to do a little of everything, when it comes to it...but I don’t need to tell you that.”

Thomas’s breath hitched inconveniently in his chest as Mr. Ellis caught his eye. 

“Well, then,” he said, rather less firmly than he’d have liked. “We’ll see how you get on, won’t we?”

He was doing a poor job of pretending he didn’t find Mr. Ellis disarmingly attractive—but that would pass soon enough. And when it did—and it _ would, _he reminded himself—he could congratulate himself for standing on principle.

“I’m grateful to you for your help,” Mr. Ellis said after a pause. 

“You won’t have much past today,” Thomas said, the sneer in his voice carefully reined in, but sharp and shining behind his teeth. “Mr. Carson keeps an eye on who does what around here...and I don’t fancy having two jobs anymore, neither.”

If Mr. Ellis had reassured him that _ Of-Course-He-Knew-That _ and he was _ Ever-So-Grateful-For-His-Time,_ that might have been the end of the butterflies in Thomas’s stomach. Or if he’d sneered back, gone cold...even held too much tension in his jaw or looked shifty about the eyes...that too would have been enough for Thomas to write Mr. Ellis off as another person in the house who he couldn’t trust and needn’t be bothered with. 

It would be easier that way, Thomas thought, searching Mr. Ellis’s face for permission to let go of whatever was so inconveniently fascinating him. So much easier. 

Mr. Ellis didn’t know what to make of Thomas’s rudeness—that much was clear in the silence that followed, in the way his brow furrowed. But rather than stepping back from his puzzlement, it was as if Mr. Ellis was stepping into it more fully. He traced Thomas with eyes that pulled at the edges of Thomas’s simmering frustrations—and those frustrations seemed terribly frayed and tired, in the light of Mr. Ellis’s searching. Silly, even. 

“I wouldn’t dream of asking you to, of course,” Mr. Ellis said wryly, and his smile made Thomas aware of his own lips twitching at the corners. 

When Mr. Ellis turned to Lord Grantham’s snuff box collection, Thomas stepped towards him, as if pulled by Mr. Ellis’s wandering gaze. 

“He collects them.” 

A stupid thing to say, really. It was obvious enough what they were for, and Mr. Ellis hadn’t asked...

“It was letter openers, for Sir Lawrence.” Mr. Ellis turned to Thomas, the grin on his face less careful than the ones before it. “If you had more money than you knew what to do with, what useless trinket would you collect?”

If Mr. Ellis didn’t walk more careful downstairs, Mr. Carson would have him out on the next milk train…

The thought should have buoyed Thomas up more than it did. 

“Can’t say I’ve given it much thought.” The coolness in Thomas’s voice was fragile and unconvincing, and it had dissipated entirely by the time he broke down and asked Mr. Ellis yet another unnecessary question: 

“What would you collect, then?”

Mr. Ellis looked surprised at Thomas’s sudden willingness to play along, but he didn’t hesitate for more than a moment before answering. 

“Teaspoons.” 

“And why’s that?” The words slipped from Thomas’s lips before he’d considered them, and Mr. Ellis picked them up before he had time to regret his weakness. 

“Well, I want something I can keep in the library, of course..”

His tone was even as anything, though his eyes shone with impish amusement before dropping back down to the snuff box case, an index finger pressing into a corner of the lid. 

“And what about you?” For the first time, Mr. Ellis sounded frightened...as if only now he’d realized how young he was, how small he appeared in such a big house, after being only “half” a valet. 

As if he’d decided Thomas was his best chance at finding some footing. 

Then he looked straight at Thomas, and the uncertainty faded behind another smile.

But Thomas had seen it, sure enough. Heard it in Mr. Ellis’s voice, felt it echo against his own lovingly concealed anxieties. 

_ Just say something_, he thought, his heart pounding wildly at being recognized. _ Wine corks, ribbons, egg cups _...it didn’t matter, so long as he played along with the game.

“Dunno, really,” he finally stammered, flinching away from how unfair the answer was. 

But Mr. Ellis’s smile didn’t falter. 

“I know it’s silly,” he said. “But once you find the right thing, you get awfully attached.” 

* * *

Thomas’s laughter died in his throat as he caught Mrs. Patmore eyeing him and Mr. Ellis from the entry into the servants’ hall. 

Sometimes he wished they’d just _ ask_...

What he _ really _ wanted was for everyone to finally mind their business, but it was no good hoping for that. 

Mr. Ellis pretended not to notice the stares and side-glances; Thomas guessed that smoothing things over was a habit of his: a habit that paid in quickly-won trust and respect, even from those who weren’t so easily taken in by a handsome face. 

Nearly everyone in the house was a little bit in love with him already, which only sharpened the indignity of Mrs. Patmore’s stares. 

They thought they were oh-so-clever, when it was the most unimaginative thing in the world to presume about his motives for befriending Mr. Ellis. 

They were wrong, too...well, partly wrong, anyway. _ Mostly _ wrong, really, now that Lady Mary was sure to inherit, and the Duke of Crowborough would be coming to stay. Thomas would be gone before any of them realized what was what, and maybe then they’d see how ridiculous they’d been. 

Still. It was a shame, everything happening all at once. Even a month ago, he’d have given Mr. Ellis more thought. A month ago, there’d been no telling when Philip might be married, and no promise he’d send for Thomas when he did (and whatever the letters in his bedroom said, Thomas had no illusions about what Philip might be getting up to in his absence. He had a life, after all, unlike Thomas). 

He had the letters, yes, and he’d told himself he’d use them, if it came to it. But there was something crass and impotent about sending such a threat by post, and Thomas had wondered if he could really bring himself to do it. 

But with James and Patrick Crawley both dead, Lord Grantham was sure to challenge the entailment, which meant Philip would have his heiress (and an eager one at that, if Lady Mary’s enthusiasm hadn’t cooled since the London season). Thomas would be the one to bring him the news. He’d come to Downton, and then Thomas’s life could begin properly. 

If they were only face-to-face, Thomas felt sure he would be able to cajole him into keeping his promise...without mentioning the letters, if he could help it. He was fond of Philip—as fond as he could be of anyone with a habit of looking just to the left of Thomas’s shoulder when he spoke to him. He had no desire to spoil it all by threatening a scandal. 

And surely, after so much time apart, it wouldn’t come to that...a little sweetness, that’s all he needed. A reminder of what they were to each other, really. 

He just had to weather a few prying eyes in the meantime. 

O’Brien protested inviting Mr. Ellis out to smoke with them, but she’d never had to spend all of dinner trying not to provoke stares by talking too much to the person sitting next to her. 

“You’re free to go somewhere else if it bothers you so much,” he’d said. She hadn’t yet taken him up on the offer. 

Mr. Ellis didn’t really smoke—Thomas could tell that right away. But then, he never pretended that he did. Not really. His tepid, infrequent drags were honest, unobtrusive. Easily overlooked in the midst of conversation, but not concealed or apologized for. 

“You didn’t tell me you’d made such an impression on the Duke when you were in London,” Mr. Ellis said, blinking in the face of the setting sun. 

“Does he answer to you now?” O’Brien sniped. 

Mr. Ellis ignored her, finally lighting his cigarette.

“Didn’t realize I had…” Thomas said, unable to hide the self-satisfaction in his voice. 

”I’m sure he’ll be surprised to see you still a footman...anyone with sense knows you should have been made a valet already,” O’Brien said, and Thomas knew she was punishing him for adding Mr. Ellis into the mix. “He might try poaching you if they don’t look careful…”

Thomas looked over at Mr. Ellis, who had brought his cigarette to his lips, his face inscrutable in the harsh shadows of the setting sun.

All Thomas could tell was that—for the first time since he’d known him—Mr. Ellis was smoking in earnest.

All three of them watched the smoke from his breath fall apart in the amber light, hushed by a reverence for the fragility of their companionship. 

His cigarette still hovering about his mouth, Mr. Ellis looked at Thomas. 

“Do you want to be poached?” 

O’Brien’s eyes were gnawing into Thomas’s skull, and Mr. Ellis was still _ really _ smoking, and perhaps Thomas had been wrong to think three people would work just as well as two. 

“I might,” he said slowly. “What’s it to you?”

Mr. Ellis blinked. “Nothing at all.” 

Maybe he was pretending—and it shouldn’t have mattered in any case—but Thomas couldn’t tell and it_ did_. 

“Right,” he muttered. O’Brien almost looked sorry about fishing for trouble.

“Only I think I’d go mad listening to him talk in pretty circles,” Mr. Ellis added after a pause. His cigarette was back to hanging uselessly at his side. “Though Lady Mary will have the worst of it...sweethearts always do.”

The words were crisp—sharp, even—and Thomas’s eyes shot up, heart thudding his chest. Mr. Ellis was already back to looking at nothing in particular—as if he’d said nothing at all. 

As if he spoke the way he smoked. And there’d be no way of knowing if he’d meant anything by it at all...not right away. 

Not until Thomas had worked him out. 

O’Brien—who was now nursing a grudge against all three of them—hadn’t notice a thing. 

“Well, don’t you just know everything…” she drawled.

* * *

“Is Daisy going to the fair tonight with the others?”

How William managed to walk on his own two feet, Thomas would never know…

“I don’t know anything about it,” Mr. Ellis said mildly over his tea. “You might ask her.”

He said it lightly and without conviction, but it irritated Thomas nonetheless. They all knew the score: Daisy wasn’t ever going to fancy William. Certainly not by this evening. 

And rather than simply telling him and letting that be that, they’d decided to play a game of pretend with him about it. So long as he got up in the morning imagining that someday Daisy might change her mind, they could all pat themselves on the back for keeping William’s limp spirits up to mope through another day. 

And maybe they were right—what did Thomas know about it, after all? Perhaps she would wake up one day and decided William Mason was just the man for her. And they’d marry, and there’d be a party where everyone would talk as if it were a relief and a surprise. A miracle, even, that William Mason had managed to do what just about every man had done since always: convince some poor girl that he could almost make her happy. 

It was all right for some, then. 

He’d have gotten over it, if Daisy hadn’t come over just then to fetch Mrs. Patmore her tea. He’d have finished with his tea, wished William well in his continued failure, and resolved to ignore everyone for the rest of the night. 

But William was steeling himself to play the fool right then and there, and that demanded a response. The rest of them could do what they wanted: Thomas wasn’t about to play the part of encouraging audience member during the farce. 

William looked as if he might faint. “Daisy, I was wondering—”

Thomas didn’t dare look at her before he started. “Would you like to go—” 

Thomas’s interruption was halted when the sound of porcelain shattering caused everyone’s head to turn. 

Mr. Ellis had knocked his tea cup onto the floor—presumably while reaching over for a biscuit.

“I’m terribly sorry…” he said. “I don’t know how I managed that…”

Thomas’s eyes narrowed as Gwen and Daisy hastened to help with the mess. William stood there uselessly, as if afraid that moving would send his nerve on permanent leave. 

“Daisy!” Mrs. Patmore called from the kitchen. “Don’t let it get cold!”

“I’ll do it; it was my own fault,” Mr. Ellis insisted, taking the broken handle from Daisy. “You go on…”

“Thanks ever so much, Mr. Ellis…” Daisy said, beaming at him before hurrying off. 

William looked at them all, dazed, his eyes lingering on Thomas for an extra beat. 

“What?” Thomas asked. “Do you want me to ask her for you, like I do everything else?”

“Don’t tease him,” Gwen said. “William, just go and finish asking her.”

William shot a glance at Mr. Ellis. “But say she doesn’t want to—”

“She will, if you just ask her,” Gwen said. “Don’t be so silly about it...I can take those, Mr. Ellis.”

He’d meant to do it, however profusely he apologized to Gwen while handing over the broken pieces of the cup carefully balanced on a saucer. If it had been an accident, he’d have looked over at Thomas by now. 

But why had he done it? What did it matter to him? Mr. Ellis wasn’t friends with William, not really...not like he was friends with Thomas. 

“And people pay to see the circus…” O’Brien said as Gwen shoved William towards the kitchen, assuring him yet again that _ of course _Daisy would say yes. 

“Aren’t you supposed to be in charge of it for the night, Miss O’Brien?” He was almost sorry for replying so vindictively, but it was the only way she’d think of leaving. 

Sure enough, she pulled her chair out with a scowl. 

“Don’t know what’s got you so sour…”

Thomas waited for her footsteps to fade before turning to Mr. Ellis, who finished with adding sugar to his new cup of tea before returning Thomas’s gaze. 

“She doesn’t want to go with him, you know that?” Thomas said, attempting a smile. 

“I know _ you _ don’t want to go with _ her_,” Mr. Ellis replied, and Thomas straightened in his chair. He couldn’t _ know _ about...surely no one would have actually _ approached _him... 

It wouldn’t take a genius, though, would it? Not with this lot. 

“Who says I don’t?” He didn’t pause long enough for Mr. Ellis to answer the question. “Anyway, you might think of Daisy. One night off from being snapped at, and she’ll be forced to spend it with that long face. You’re not doing them any favors.”

Mr. Ellis looked down at his tea with a smile. 

“No, I suppose I’m not,” he said, clasping the cup tight in his hands before taking an overlarge sip. 

“She could always say no,” Mr. Ellis said. The cup came back down on its saucer with a conspicuous clatter. “If she doesn’t want to go.”

Thomas laughed. “_Daisy _? She’s lucky if they’ll let her breathe without asking Mrs. Patmore.”

“Well, that’s no reason for you not to spend your evening doing what you’d like.” 

No, there were a million reasons for that—or really just one massive reason. One that could shatter his life into bits if he didn’t spend every moment being careful.

It would take more than a broken cup and some pretty words to change that. 

“Suppose I’m like William, and I can’t have what I like?” A dangerous thing to say, if Mr. Ellis was half as sharp as Thomas gave him credit for being. 

Mr. Ellis shook his head, fingers still wrapped around his cup. 

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” he said with a smile. “You’re nothing like William.”

Which Thomas had always known, of course. 

But he hadn’t known how nice that difference could be until Mr. Ellis pulled him aside on their way back from the fair. How warm and familiar he felt in his own skin as they kissed. How tall he could stand when he realized that no one—not even the lovers in the novels he pretended not to read—would ever understand things precisely this way. 

What it meant to have Richard Ellis press an ungloved palm against his cheek, his smile softening his eyes in just-that-way. How it felt to breathe when someone was looking at you—not through or past or above—but dead-on...and didn’t seem to want to look away. And how perilously, how wondrously, thrilling it was to look at them right back. 

It was like having teaspoons in the library. Ridiculous, right up until the point you decided it wasn’t. Right up until you decided that teaspoons in the library was just the thing. 

Was everything, even. 

Richard fumbled with his glove and Thomas held his hat for him and the next time they looked at each other, it wasn’t frightening at all. 

And maybe—every once in a while—it was all right for him, too. 


	2. Bluebirds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On to Season 2! There's a little twist at the beginning, aided by my love of taking small throwaway details (in this case: Thomas's gossipy valet friend from Season 1...the one who basically starts the Mary Scandal). 
> 
> No major changes to content warnings or rating--I took us up to a T just to be safe, but we're talking PG-13 kind of T. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

**Prologue— June, 1911 **

Thomas tumbled down the servants’ staircase behind Mr. Ellis, his cheeks on fire. 

“And the ladies upstairs think Sir Frederick is a cold fish...” Mr. Ellis laughed. Thomas tried for a smile, but as he could hardly breathe, it didn’t amount to much. 

Two minutes ago, he’d thought his life was over...it _ would _ be over, if Mr. Ellis decided to tell anyone what he’d seen. 

“I know I had no business being there—”

Mr. Ellis stopped him with a wave of his hand. 

“You’re louder than you think, you know that?” he said, still grinning. “We’ll talk outside…and try not to faint before we get there.”

Thomas supposed being Lord Savident’s valet meant Mr. Ellis didn’t blush at much: Mrs. Hughes called Lord Savident “cosmopolitan,” her lips drawn in a thin line, before warning the maids to keep a wide berth if they knew what was good for them; Mr. Carson preferred not to call Lord Savident anything at all. 

However, Lord Savident’s indulgences lay solidly with women and wine, which put what Thomas and Sir Frederick had been doing rather outside of Mr. Ellis’s purview. 

He was taking it remarkably well. Then again, Thomas had never met someone so quick on their feet as Mr. Ellis.

Thomas wasn’t given to being friendly with other men in service—too many things might go amiss—but Mr. Ellis hadn’t given him much choice. From the start of the London season, he’d taken Thomas under his wing—which turned out to be a hidey-hole filled to the brim with gossip and ill-won favors. 

It was a dizzying world, and unlike anything Thomas had encountered at Downton. But it was also a world he hadn’t needed to squeeze into the crawlspace of. 

Mr. Ellis had handed him a key and opened a window, and the effect was intoxicating. 

And now this...Thomas couldn’t have imagined this. He’d always been on his own, when it came to these matters. When it came to most matters, in fact...

The door clicked shut behind them, and Thomas allowed himself to finally believe that he was safe. Someone knew, and he was still safe. More than that, even—someone knew, and they seemed to still want to know him. 

“I don’t know how to thank—”

“—you were such a sport with Lady Desmond,” Mr. Ellis said, genial as ever. “I’ve been hoping I could return the favor...it’s your first London season, after all.” 

Thomas returned his grin, though it was weighed down by the memory of that night. He had no right to feel so cut up about it, but there was no denying his heart had broken a little. Peter Ellis was like his employer—a notorious flirt—but Thomas had wondered if perhaps their banter was different. If it meant something else. 

Then he’d had to shoo Mr. Ellis out from under a skirt before one of the maids came in, and he’d tempered his expectations. He’d learned since coming to London that quite a few men fancied both men and women—which was fine, in theory.

But if more than Mr. Ellis’s eyes wandered, then he’d never be able to give Thomas what he wanted.

“That’s a different thing, though, isn’t it?” Thomas said. No bloke would get arrested for having a lady under him, so long as she wanted to be there. 

“Only technically,” Mr. Ellis said, with such casual sincerity that Thomas’s breath hitched in his throat. 

People didn’t say things like that. Not ever. 

“Thank you.” Thomas swallowed back the tears that threatened to overtake him. If Mr. Ellis had so gracefully side-stepped a scene after seeing a crime being committed, there wasn’t a reason in the world for Thomas to draw one up now. 

“I know how it is, for men like you,” Mr. Ellis said. “Well, I’ve been _ told_, anyway.”

He laughed—as if it were nothing to say such things—and it fooled Thomas into grinning as well.

“By _ who_?”

But Mr. Ellis’s face went uncharacteristically pensive, and Thomas knew he wasn’t about to be treated to the usual glut of gossip. For a moment, he thought Mr. Ellis was teetering on the edge of telling him something he ordinarily kept close to his chest (a small collection, Thomas imagined). Then, in an instant, the weight of consideration lifted.

“If that’s a test of my ability to keep a secret, Thomas,” he said, light as he’d ever been, “I’ll have you know that in this case my lips are sealed.” 

And though Thomas’s mind was still puzzling over who had enlightened Mr. Ellis about _ men-like-him_, he had to admit that learning Mr. Ellis wouldn’t blab was a rather more comforting piece of knowledge. 

* * *

  
**June, 1917**

“It seems it’s always bad news, these days.” O’Brien approached Thomas in that new way-—slow and stilted and laden with pity. It set Thomas’s teeth on edge, but he didn’t see how he could get her to stop. The war had turned everyone backwards and inside out—everyone it hadn’t blown to bits, that is. 

Thomas clutched the letter he’d received in the morning post tighter in hand, avoiding the sappy, sad stare O’Brien had adopted. 

“Peter Ellis is dead,” he said softly. “Lord Savident’s valet.”

One of the only men Thomas had ever called a friend, killed in a country that wasn’t his, in a war he couldn’t do a thing to stop. 

And only weeks since Lieutenant Courtenay had broken his own tether to life, even after Thomas had tried—God, he’d tried so _ hard _—to convince him to stay and weather it all out. 

He’d given so few pieces of his heart away—was he really to lose them all at once? 

“God in heaven…” O’Brien joined Thomas against the shed wall. “There won’t be anyone left by the time they’re through.”

That horrible, sad look hadn’t left her eyes. Thomas ignored it as he exchanged the letter in his hand for a pair of cigarettes. She took the one he held out to her, his hands now steady, and for a long while they didn’t say anything. 

That was the worst part of it—finding out you could run out of things to say when the world fell apart around you. 

“It was his mother who wrote,” Thomas said. “There’ll be a service, and they want me to come.”

“Did he talk about you that much?”

Thomas shirked away from the image of Peter Ellis—lively and handsome and eternally grinning—sitting with his family full of lively, lovely, smiling people...and telling them about Thomas Barrow. 

His intrusion on the scene doused it with an unforgiving chill, a hushed discomfort. Thomas didn’t fit many places, but he fit in that scene least of all.

“Must’ve picked up my name from some letters he left,” he muttered, putting out his cigarette. He mulled over taking another one, but he was beginning to feel sick. 

“I can only assume they didn’t read them,” O’Brien said with a smile. Despite the fact that Thomas had wanted nothing more than for her to stop being so soft and cloying, he resented her lightness now. 

“It wasn’t like that, ever,” he snapped. A shiver passed over O’Brien’s face, and Thomas turned painfully away. He hadn’t realized until now that she had always been the one to bring up his inclinations...which meant she’d always been prepared to speak about it without flinching. 

He’d always assumed she didn’t need to flinch at all.

Stupid of him. 

“Of course not,” she said. “I only meant that he wasn’t too careful with his mouth, was he?” 

Thomas didn’t return her tentative smile. Her face fell, and for the briefest moment he felt sorry for expecting her to be better than almost anyone else he’d ever known.

She was good enough to him, and that was the truth of it. Too good, sometimes. He didn’t know what to do with it, and he certainly didn’t know how to trust in it. 

“I know you’re hurt,” she said softly. “But he’d be the last person who would want you to think of him and—”

“—oh, please, don’t put us through that routine,” Thomas sighed, stepping away from the wall. It would be top of the hour soon, anyway. 

“Thomas—”

“—Mr. Lang’s inside if you want to play mother bird, all right?” Thomas didn’t look at her. “I have work to do.” 

* * *

Thomas had no business going to York for the service—the only person he knew would be in a casket, and Peter’s mother had surely only asked as a kindness. They wouldn’t care a jot one way or the other if he actually turned up. 

But grief made Thomas sentimental, and if there was a chance that funerals weren’t only for the living, he’d want Peter to know he’d given a damn. 

So he went to York, praying that his uniform would grant him the veneer of dull respectability that the occasion called for. He’d pay his respects, the family—if he met them at all—would forget his face before they’d turned away from him, and he’d be on the bus home in time for supper. 

And then it would be finished. Peter Ellis would be buried, and no one but Thomas would ever care that they had been such good friends.

No one aside from Thomas would ever know _ why _they’d been such good friends. 

He hid outside the church until it was nearly time to start, avoiding anyone who looked like they might be a family member. They could only spoil each other’s day. 

He sat in the back. No one asked who he was or so much as looked at him for more than a moment. He’d nearly escaped the churchyard entirely at the end of things when Mrs. Ellis caught him. 

“You’re Thomas Barrow, aren’t you?” 

Thomas had been so taken aback at being recognized by someone he’d never met that he’d almost said no. 

And he almost ran off entirely when she asked him for tea only a moment later.

“I wouldn’t want to intrude on your family at a time like this,” Thomas said, looking back at the church. He shouldn’t have come at all, and if he stayed for tea, they were bound to figure that out for themselves.

Mrs. Ellis shook her head. “I can’t think of a time we’d need it more.” 

That had rather inconveniently changed things.

Mrs. Ellis was different than Thomas had imagined—his own mother had slipped away young and hollow-eyed, and in his bitterness, he often imagined everyone else’s mother as the picture of stout and solid maternity. 

But Mrs. Ellis’s eyes were as youthful as Peter’s—even her grief couldn’t hide that. She spoke as well as he had, too: Thomas supposed the walk to their cottage had taken up more time than it seemed.

There was something easy about talking with her, just like with Peter. 

The Ellis’ cottage was small, but well cared for. There was something in that, Thomas thought. Having a place to care for because it was yours. 

He’d spent his childhood wanting to see greater things, bigger places...it hadn’t mattered so much then whether he could claim ownership of anything he saw, so long as he was _ there _. He had himself, and that meant he could go anywhere, leave when he liked. It cost nothing to walk on his own two feet and take in the world around him. No one could steal away his memories or imaginings; if he held them close, no one could sneer at them either. 

But there was something in it, having a place that was yours by right. A place you could share, if you wanted. 

“Mr. Ellis will be right behind us, I expect, with Richard—my younger son,” Mrs. Ellis said, fussing with the kettle. “They’ll have stopped off to thank Reverend Dawson…I should have stayed too, but I...well, I wanted to be home.”

She took a deep breath, and Thomas noticed her hands were shaking. 

“It was a lovely service, Mrs. Ellis,” Thomas said encouragingly, hoping she wouldn’t cry. He was better with crying than he used to be—the war had forced his hand there-—but he’d rather avoid the business altogether. 

Mrs. Ellis’s face threatened to crumple, but she found her footing in time (of course, Peter’s mother _ would _). 

“Peter always spoke of you so fondly…” she said, smiling at Thomas. “Now I know why.” 

She didn’t, of course. She didn’t know a thing about him—and certainly none of the two dozen things Thomas could list off that would cause her to toss him back out the door on his ear. 

But they could spend a happy afternoon pretending. Indeed, Thomas half-forgot that he was with strangers until the door opened, and Mr. Ellis and the other son came back home. 

He stood quickly, out of habit and out of nerves, wincing at the scrape of the chair on the floor. The two men smiled the same smile at his hurried movements—Thomas noticed that first, and it helped anchor his wits as he took them in. 

After Lady Crawley had lost her baby, Mrs. Hughes had said that women carried their grief on the inside of their bodies, while men carried it on the outside. It was a load of nonsense (which Thomas had told her—not as gracefully as he might have, looking back). Pain went everywhere it could find space to burrow, and where it couldn’t find space, it ate out a hole for itself. 

Still, there was little denying that Mr. Ellis looked more torn up at first glance than Mrs. Ellis. The pronounced circles under his eyes, the tremor in his voice as he greeted his wife...he’d been utterly torn through by the loss of his son. 

The other son—Richard (Private Ellis, if he were to be proper about it)—had the same eyes as Peter. That was the main thing that made Thomas’s heart thud in his chest as Private Richard Ellis caught his stare and smiled. 

The trappings around them were different: Peter’s grin had been wide and toothy, while Richard’s smile for Thomas was reserved, almost private. He moved with less urgency than Peter had, and there was a careful stillness about him that Thomas didn’t think had come about with grief. 

But his eyes were as young and warm and living as Peter’s had been, and Thomas wondered if he hadn’t made a worse mistake than he could have imagined in coming. 

“—one of Peter’s friends from service,” Mrs. Ellis had finished with her introduction by the time Thomas’s ears stopped picking up his heartbeat. 

“Barrow?” Richard’s brow furrowed. “At Lord Savident’s? I don’t think he mentioned-—”

“I was at Downton,” Thomas said, too loudly. “That is...we met in London, during the season.”

Richard’s face brightened. 

“Oh, you’re _ Thomas_!” 

He said his name like someone who had puzzled over what it meant, someone who had taken it apart and considered the pieces. Someone who was fond of them—all of them, even the parts he hadn’t worked out just yet. 

A feather could have knocked Thomas down. 

“I’m not sure I like the sound of that…” he said, attempting a laugh, and looking haphazardly around the room. 

Mrs. Ellis’s brow raised at her son’s familiarity. 

“I was just telling Sergeant Barrow how well Peter always spoke of him,” she said. 

“He did, yes,” Richard said, nodding. Then he caught Thomas’s eye. “Quite often, actually.”

Thomas knew he was staring, and smiling too widely besides. But what was he supposed to do when a handsome man said his name like that, looking right at him? Like it was nothing at all? 

He was Peter’s brother, all right—though Thomas hoped not in every respect. 

“He could paint a picture, couldn’t he?” he said, letting his eyes dart across Richard’s shoulders, down his left arm. He was tired of uniformed men by now, but Richard cut quite the figure in his. 

And in a suit jacket...Thomas pressed his lips together to keep them shut. 

“Sometimes with broad strokes,” Richard said with a laugh. His eyes didn’t move from Thomas’s face, and whether it he meant it or not, it was sending a flush up Thomas’s skin. 

It wasn’t right for him to feel this way, under such circumstances. But what was he supposed to do? Pluck his eyes out and curse the Fates? 

No, it was too late to do a thing about it: he’d simply have to bear having tea with a man who made him feel warm all over.

The last thing Thomas wanted to talk about was the war, but it came up sooner than Thomas would have liked when Mrs. Ellis mentioned that Richard had managed to get the whole week for leave. 

“And after being there for a year with hardly a day of it,” she griped. “I’d have gone to Parliament if they’d given you less…” 

“I didn’t expect half that, to tell you the truth,” Richard said. Thomas nodded, and Richard flashed him a knowing look. “You can feel the noose tightening up at the front...it’s only a matter of waiting to see who’ll kick out a stool first…”

Mrs. Ellis’s face voiced her distaste at Richard’s morbid metaphor, and she clutched the teapot tight in her hands as she poured Mr. Ellis a second cup. 

“Richard’s our wordsmith,” she said, a thread of fondness softening her otherwise terse tone. 

“You write, Private Ellis?” Thomas jumped on the chance to talk of something else...something that might draw Richard’s attention to him. 

Richard shook his head. “No, nothing like that.” 

“You did write, when you were small…” Mrs. Ellis said. “You remember your Christmas show you wrote?”

Richard looked down at his cup. “Mum, I don’t think Sergeant Barrow—”

“—do you remember you and Peter arguing over who was going to play the bluebird?” 

Mrs. Ellis’s eyes had gone dreamy, and Thomas looked at her bemusedly before turning to Richard for an explanation. 

“It was the principal role,” Richard said dryly, his eyes sparkling.

Thomas raised an eyebrow. “In a Christmas show?” 

Richard was back to not looking away from Thomas. 

“I might have overthought it all.” 

“It was sweet…” Mrs. Ellis said. “That’s how you all come out. Just sweet as anything.”

She looked over at her husband, who seemed determined to finish the pot of tea by himself. Thomas thought darkly of his own father, who hadn’t so much as written since Thomas had come back from the front. 

It wasn’t fair that people who loved their children had to feel sicker at heart than the people who didn’t. 

He plastered on a wider smile to cover his resentment, and the pretending must have worked, for he managed to get through tea without putting any of them off.

Mrs. Ellis insisted on Richard accompanying Thomas to the bus stop, a request Richard seemed only too happy to comply with. 

“You’ll look in if you’re ever in town, won’t you?” she asked Thomas, who didn’t think he was lying when he promised he would. 

“She’ll love you forever for coming,” Richard said as they started off. 

“I was glad to.” Thomas shot Richard a teasing look. “Was it not what you expected_ Thomas _ to do?” 

He was itching to know just what Peter had told Richard that had made him sound so familiar, right from the start. 

Meanwhile, Peter had hardly _ mentioned _his brother to Thomas...

Richard laughed. “No, _ Thomas _ always shows up—if he’s invited. He’ll even be early...though he pretends not to.”

He grinned at Thomas, who thought blushingly of his skulking in the churchyard earlier that day.

“You know a lot about him, then?”

Richard shrugged. “I knew Peter, and he told me about you.”

_ He never told me anything about you. _

Richard pulled on one of his gloves. “Before the war, he was talking like he might ask you over, next time he was off. So he’ll be glad you’ve come by.”

“He might have had something different in mind for that visit…”

Richard’s face conceded the point. He tugged on the same glove, and Thomas realized just how terribly sad it was that they would never know him together. 

“I think he’d be happy in any case,” Richard said. “He always thought you’d fit here nicely, and—”

He teased his lower lip, considering his words. Thomas slowed his pace, feeling a suspicious weight in his chest. 

“—and what?” he said, after it became clear Richard wasn’t intending to continue without prompting. 

“He made it sound like you might fancy having a place to fit,” Richard said, his eyes meeting Thomas’s for only an instant before dropping to the ground. Much like the pit of Thomas’s stomach. 

Because now he knew the score: he’d been pitied, that was all. A pathetic figure that Peter had written home about so his cozy family could clutch at their hearts and wonder how they could help. 

He hadn’t been a person to Peter Ellis, much less a friend. He’d been Thomas the mismatched glove. Two left shoes. One of those trinkets you keep on the shelf that you don’t really like, but someone dear gave it to you as a present and maybe someday that’ll be enough. 

“Well, then,” he muttered, feeling cold all over. He wanted to be home right then, in his own bed, in his own room, where he could be as lonely as he liked, and there would be no one to notice or care. 

“You don’t agree?” Richard said lightly. 

“I can find places to fit on my own—if I want to.” 

The words were brittle, but they found their mark. Richard’s shoulders stiffened, and Thomas waited with a perverse anticipation for the sting of Richard’s anger: it would hurt for a moment or two, but the ice that followed would act as a salve for his dignity. 

But though he could see what Richard wanted to say flashing in his eyes, the expected outburst never came. The longer the silence between them drew out, the smaller Thomas felt. 

Peter couldn’t have painted Thomas with as much contempt as Thomas had just painted himself. In three seconds, no less. 

Practically a record. 

“You take whatever you’d like to heart,” Richard finally said, looking away from Thomas. “You’ll be the one to carry it around.”

It was finished, then. The pretending he’d done all afternoon, come to nothing. He had seen to that well enough. 

“You know Peter wouldn’t have cared so much about anybody he didn’t think would do the same for him?” 

Thomas looked at Richard, amazed at being spoken to again. Richard looked resolved about something, though Thomas couldn’t think what. Could he really have caught a glimpse of Thomas’s bitter, gnarled core and decided it might be reasoned with? 

Thomas could only stare at him breathlessly, and Richard almost smiled. 

“He told me about Lady Desmond,” he said quietly. 

Thomas must have looked as shocked as he felt, for Richard grinned properly at his reaction. 

“It seems silly,” Thomas said, still dazed by the turn in conversation. “To look back on that, now that the world has changed so much.”

Richard nodded. He gave Thomas another long, puzzling look before speaking, his eyes turning to the road ahead of them. 

“Sergeant Barrow, when I said you needed a place to fit…” Thomas could see the words turning in his mind. “It doesn’t matter how great the oak tree is if its roots run up against a wall. That’s all I meant by it.”

Thomas knew Peter had never noticed anything with such delicacy and astuteness. Richard had come to such a conclusion all on his own. 

“Right,” he murmured. “Of course. I shouldn’t have…”

“It’s no matter,” Richard said, shoving his hands in his pockets. 

Thomas wished he could work up the nerve to ask Richard how he _ knew_. How had he seen so clearly what the trouble was, ordered the tangled mess up and put it in pretty, even-rowed words?

They could walk forever, and Thomas wouldn’t know how to ask _ that _ question. 

But if he asked him something, it might get him closer to guessing. 

“Why a bluebird?” he said, smiling at Richard’s perplexed expression. “In your play, I mean?”

Richard laughed. “I think you’ll find the story less interesting than you’re imagining.”

“Well, why don’t you tell it, and we’ll see?” Thomas said, smirking at his own cheek. Whatever else happened, he was still walking the streets of York with a handsome man. The advantage was his for the taking…

Richard made a show of sighing. 

“You know ‘The Ugly Duckling’?”

“Course I do.” He’d never liked it. People didn’t molt: if something was ugly or ill-fitting, it would have to be lopped off or borne up with. 

Not everything had a season, and that was the truth. 

“It was just that, but with a bluebird,” Richard said. “I suppose I had to be original, didn’t I?”

Thomas frowned. “But what was the bluebird really? Or is the bluebird what it turned into?”

To his surprise, Richard paused before answering.

“The bluebird knew it was a bluebird the whole time,” he said carefully. “It just didn’t know whether it wanted to be.”

Thomas’s heart leaped in his chest at Richard’s cautious smile. 

He knew now why Peter had thought he’d fit. 

* * *

**December, 1917**

Peter had written pages of sentences that rolled into one another, as if he’d expelled everything in a single breath. Richard’s letters were never long enough, and Thomas could feel the pauses on the page as he considered his choice of words, though the touch of Richard’s pen was as light as Peter’s had been. 

He didn’t need to ask or wonder if they were love letters anymore. The care each letter had been given seeped from the page into his fingers, warming them as he remembered how frightened he’d been to pen the first one. How silly it now seemed to be frightened of anything about Richard Ellis. 

Eventually, he’d have to take the permanent leap across the divide and find out for certain if Richard was Like Him, if he wanted what Thomas wanted. 

He’d never been less afraid of anything. 

“Another one from Private Ellis?” 

Thomas folded the letter instinctively at Nurse Crawley’s approach, though she was the only person in the house he didn’t mind sharing Richard with. Not all of it, of course, though he supposed she’d guessed about him after Lieutenant Courtenay. 

If she _ had _ guessed, she was one of the first people to like him better afterwards. 

“It’s slow going over there—at least where he is.” 

“I’m sure you’re glad of that.” 

He was, though he preferred not to think of it at all. He’d be grateful and glad and all of that when the war was over and Richard came back safe. 

“I’m glad you’ve found a friend,” she said. “You’re much nicer for having one. We all are, I suppose.”

Thomas hazarded a grin. 

“I think you’ve got it the wrong way ‘round, Nurse Crawley.” 

Sybil smiled. “No, I don’t think I do.”

* * *

**January, 1919**

He hadn’t been like this in years—lazy, skin-to-skin with a man. Nowhere to be, the urgency of desire behind them for a time. Everything right at his fingertips, warm and soft and his. 

“I won’t take anything perishable,” he assured Richard, who still looked disapproving, even as he ran his hands along Thomas’s back. 

“You might not take anything _ edible_,” he quipped. “You’re just as likely to get a bag of sawdust if you pay that much upfront.”

Thomas didn’t want to argue—especially because he wasn’t overly attached to jumping into the black market. It was something to do, that was all. 

“I have to try something, now the war’s over,” he said halfheartedly. 

“You’re trained in the medical field, now,” Richard said. “Why not go on with that?”

“They don’t need my help at the village hospital now that things are settled.”

Richard smiled. “What if I told you there’s a hospital here in York? And everywhere else besides?”

He took Thomas’s chin in his right hand, pulling his face down to kiss him. Thomas relaxed into the kiss, pressing his forehead against Richard’s after they pulled apart. 

“I don’t want to go far,” he admitted. “I like what I’m used to.”

Richard nodded, running his hand through Thomas’s hair. “Just not being a footman.” 

Thomas pulled back so he could look at Richard properly. 

“No, that too. It’s why I’m afraid to go back to it, even just for now. They’d let me back, I know it. But I’d never leave, if I took it up again.”

Richard searched his face. “And you want to leave Downton.”

It felt wrong to say, somehow. It had been his home, his place of safety, for so long. Back when he was at the front, all he’d done was dream of coming back to it. 

But it wasn’t his properly, and it never would be. 

“I have to,” he said. “There has to be more than this.”

Richard leaned up to kiss him again, the corners of his mouth already smiling. 

“I think between the two of us, we can come up with something…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! As usual--look for a new Richard to show up for Season 3...


	3. Keeping Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On to Season 3--this one got a little out of hand length-wise, but I think it's a fun one! 
> 
> No major rating or content tag changes--but you'll notice there's another ship tag for Daisy/Ivy...because we needed some lesbians on Downton Abbey!

**April, 1920**

“If His Lordship had just let me keep Alfred on for the house party…”

“We’ve managed without footmen before, Mr. Carson…” Mrs. Hughes said. “We’ve got Mr. Barrow to help, and there’s a boy from the village coming up…one with some training, if Madge can be trusted not to exaggerate.”

Mr. Carson gave a world-weary sigh that told a novel-length tale about what he thought Madge could be trusted with.

“But _ can _ she, Mrs. Hughes?” 

“Well, we’ll find out soon either way…”

Mr. Carson gave her and Thomas a withering look before returning to shuffling papers on his desk, looking quite useless. Thomas smiled. 

“You didn’t expect it, Mr. Carson, did you?” he said, aiming the words just right. “Alfred seemed such a favorite of yours.”

“What we need least of all just now, Mr. Barrow, is your cheek,” Mrs. Hughes said before leaving the room. Thomas lingered just long enough to be assured Carson could do nothing but stare imperiously at him, then turned on his heel and followed her out the door. 

Miss O’Brien was right—the thing that really paid was having the ear of someone upstairs.

Carson would have blustered about the whole affair, hemming and hawing and making excuses for the overgrown dullard...and by then, O’Brien might have found something that stuck to Thomas. 

But one word to Lord Grantham, and Alfred was sent packing with tears in his eyes. 

If she cared about Alfred as much as she pretended to, O’Brien would have taken the blame for the stolen shirts. She hadn’t, of course...it was everyone else’s job to stick their neck out for her family, while she stayed slinking in corners and making demands. 

“You’ll be sorry, in time,” she hissed as Thomas passed her on the way to the servants’ hall. Thomas slowed, letting Madge and Alice pass them up before speaking. 

“I’m sorry _ now_, Miss O’Brien,” he said, looking just over the top of her head. “Alfred seemed a nice lad...he might’ve done better in a house where he was allowed to take his time, rather than having his head filled with ideas of moving up before he was ready. I only hope he’s learned his lesson...and his place.”

O’Brien’s eyes were as dark as Thomas had ever seen them.

“Don’t you worry about Alfred—he’ll land on his feet,” she murmured. “Can’t say the same for you…”

In spite of himself, Thomas’s shoulders tensed at the threat. He wasn’t frightened of her, exactly...only the hushed, shaking chill in her voice signaled a point of no return. 

They would never be friendly again. She’d started it, of course, trying to punish him for not helping Alfred pass him up...but he’d finished things off. 

They’d been friends ten years—two of them counted in letters he’d memorized while trying to ignore the sounds of war around him. He’d written the soppiest drivel back to her, and she’d always written again anyway. 

He’d never had the notion that anyone was waiting anxiously for him before. Perhaps he never would again. 

For an instant—gone before the thought could fully cohere—Thomas wished he could bring Alfred back and pretend it hadn’t happened. 

He took too long to form a retort; as she turned around, his stomach twisted. 

That was it, then.

A weight settled on his shoulders that couldn’t be alleviated by a sigh and a lift of his chin—though he tried it anyway, managing an upturn in his lips that could be mistaken for a smile for the length of time anyone in the house actually looked at him. 

He saw the maids staring before he noticed the figure in the entry to the servants’ hall. The young man come to cover for Alfred, he supposed…

And small wonder the maids were staring.

“Who’s this?” he asked, taking his time about eyeing the young man. Madge had never mentioned any blokes in the village at all…and certainly not this one.

He grinned at Thomas, confidence sparkling in his eyes. And what a welcome change from Alfred_ that _ was.

“Jimmy Kent, at your service.” 

* * *

**May, 1920**

“What d’you suppose they’re gossiping about?” Jimmy frowned, eyes following Madge and Alice out of the kitchen.

“The new footman, who else?” Daisy said, sounding displeased. “He’s in the servants’ hall, taking his tea.”

“He’s awfully nice,” Ivy said.

“How’d you know that?” Daisy said with a scowl (and Thomas didn’t think she needed to be putting _ that _ much weight on her rolling pin). “You’ve hardly known him a minute.”

Ivy shrugged, looking unbothered. Daisy’s sudden griping had taken most everyone else by surprise, but Ivy didn’t know any better. To her, Daisy’s jagged edges were a matter of course, and she had learned to adapt to them quicker than anyone else.

“Just a feeling,” she said, her smile undiminished.

“Well, I have a feeling we’ll be late getting the potatoes in if you lot don’t stop using the kitchen as a town hall,” Mrs. Patmore said, shooing Thomas and Jimmy out. 

A muscle was flexing in Jimmy’s jaw. He’d been on edge about the new footman for the better part of a week, and things had only gotten worse after he overheard Lady Mary telling Mr. Carson to pick a “handsome” one. 

Of course she had: it was rather a standard request when it came to footmen. Mr. Carson would have preferred a series of men as dull as dishwater, but no one else wanted an Alfred or a William serving them day in and day out.

But Jimmy had spent some weeks being the pretty new toy, and the prospect of being passed over for a newcomer had sent him reeling. 

“I told you...didn’t I tell you?” Jimmy hissed as they made their way towards the servants’ hall.

Thomas clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t go losing your head about it before we’ve even met the chap…”

An unfamiliar laugh came from the servants’ hall—hearty and jovial. Thomas avoided Jimmy’s panicked stare.

“Ivy said he was friendly…so we knew that already…” he murmured, as if that were at all the point. Voices didn’t tell the whole story, but they were often a helpful summary. And someone who wasn’t attractive—and self-possessed and likable besides—didn’t laugh like that.

Thomas didn’t need to look at the new arrival for more than a moment to know that meeting the man wasn’t going to alleviate a single one of Jimmy’s fears. Even relaxed as he was in his chair, Thomas guessed the new footman had a few inches on Jimmy. He was older, too, and he looked it in all the right ways. More established, more comfortable…more himself than Jimmy ever seemed (though Thomas had his suspicions about why that was).

Perhaps it was the way he moved his head as he spoke, or the way he leaned into the lilts of his Yorkshire accent…or maybe that his eyes kept a special accord with the smile that never quite left his lips…but something kept the rest of the table captivated by his story.

Against all odds, it seemed Carson really had chosen a “handsome one.” Thomas pulled his gaze away from the new footman and over to Jimmy, who looked almost ill.

“—the whole family were taking off abroad, so it was a sinking ship for most of the staff,” the new footman finished, taking a sip of tea.

“It’s a changing world…” Mrs. Hughes agreed, and the table nodded, still transfixed.

“And I promised my mum I’d take work closer, if I could find it.”

There, at least, was more of the same…emboldened by the admission, Thomas cleared his throat.

“Mr. Carson...”

Mr. Carson blinked at them in confusion (they really _ were _old news, then…) before nodding sharply.

“Ah, yes…Mr. Barrow, James…you’ll have noticed our new footman’s arrived. Richard Ellis—he comes highly recommended from the Fairworth estate.”

Richard stood to greet them, though Thomas suspected he’d have stayed sitting down if he’d been able to sense the steam coming out of Jimmy’s ears as he stood to full height.

“I’m Mr. Barrow, His Lordship’s valet,” Thomas said. “This is Jimmy—”

“—_ James_, Mr. Barrow,” Mr. Carson drawled, standing slowly as well. “His name is James.”

Richard nodded, though he smirked as Carson passed into the hallway.

“I’ll try and keep it straight,” he said, looking at Jimmy. “You’re the other footman, then?”

Jimmy didn’t soften at Richard’s affable tone.

“_First _footman, yes.” 

A childish thing to say—he wouldn’t get anywhere playing games like that. Worst of all, Thomas could see that Richard knew that as well as he did: he couldn’t have looked less bothered if he’d tried.

“I’d better finish settling in,” he said, paying Jimmy’s comment no mind. “Good to meet you.”

Thomas waited until he was well out of earshot before turning to Jimmy, whose face was turning red.

“You mustn’t let his coming here unsettle you,” he murmured. “You were here first, you know what you’re about—”

“—and what’ll that matter, in a few weeks?” Jimmy protested. “He’ll pick it all up, if he has half a brain.”

“So?”

Jimmy stared at him, dumbfounded.

“He’s taller, he’s...” he faltered at saying the fateful words. “Suppose they like him better upstairs?” 

Thomas shook his head.

“Suppose all you like...my money’s on you.”

Truthfully, he was glad he hadn’t needed to put anything but sentiment on the betting table.

* * *

He’d been sleeping. Lady Sybil had been suffocated by her own seizures, and he’d been sleeping. 

Someone must have known it would happen, someone had to have guessed at the very least...and they’d let him go to sleep. Thomas blamed everyone—the doctors, the book on his bedside table, the universe itself—for not pushing him to stay up just a little longer. Just in case. 

The only person in the world who would have thought to tell him was Lady Sybil herself. She’d understood what Thomas couldn’t put into words: he was better with the dying than the dead. Death was too weighty a thing to stumble upon while still bleary-eyed and ungrateful. You had to stand at attention for it to be borne...Thomas didn’t know how to explain it, but some small, still reverent part of him felt duty-bound to see death through one door and out the other. 

She would have told him to stay awake because she knew how he was, and he would have listened without qualms because he trusted her. 

He didn’t see how he’d ever find such an accord again...he hardly knew how he’d managed it the first time. 

For now, he’d settle for being able to sleep without being jolted awake by a rough and phantom hand.

“Mr. Barrow?” 

Thomas took his time turning at the worktable in the yard, tapping his cigarette over an ashtray as he did.

He opened his mouth to ask why Richard was standing in the doorway with the clock that sat on the mantle in the Mercia, but found himself unable to do anything but take a halting breath of the chill morning air.

“I’ve a patient for you…” Richard said, indicating the clock. If he was bothered by Thomas’s silence, he didn’t show it. He strode over, looking as amiable as he always did, hesitating for only a moment before sitting next to Thomas at the worktable.

“Isn’t Jimmy still in charge of the clocks?” Thomas said, more gruffly than he meant to. 

“He is, but this one’s stalled, somehow...” Richard set the clock on the table with care. “I don’t know how to describe it...Jimmy said you’d know what to do.”

Thomas stared blankly at the unmoving clock face. Ten to one, Jimmy had over-wound it and damaged the spring. He didn’t understand how to feel it all out—he hadn’t learned that sort of care, yet.

“Could have asked me himself…” Thomas grumbled, pulling the clock towards him. Richard watched him turn it in hand before speaking.

“How are you?”

Thomas took a drag on his cigarette before answering.

“I’ll be fine.”

“But for now?”

Thomas tensed about the shoulders.

“Now I’m not. Nothing to be done about that, though, is there?”

Richard nodded, looking down at his hands before speaking.

“Do you mind the company, Mr. Barrow?”

If he were stronger, Thomas would have said yes. He’d already driven Jimmy away with his grief, and he’d positively terrified Lord Grantham by almost bursting into tears while dressing him for breakfast. Better for everyone if he passed some time by himself, for a while. 

But he couldn’t say the words, and Richard didn’t let the silence speak for him. Finally, Thomas was forced to shake his head.

“No, I can’t say I do,” he admitted, his own face brightening at Richard’s smile.

“Right, then: you can show me how to fix it,” Richard said. “I’ll tell Jimmy how we managed it, and then we’ll all three of us know. Never have a broken clock again.”

“Though the walls of Downton may fall…” Thomas put out the end of his cigarette, reaching into his pocket for another.

“Can you spare one?”

Thomas raised an eyebrow, taking two cigarettes from his pack.

“I can.”

He fumbled with his lighter—it happened, sometimes, when he grabbed it without thinking—and perhaps that was why he held the flame out to Richard rather than handing the lighter over. To prove he could hold it after all, that he wasn’t as broken as he seemed.

Richard didn’t hesitate in leaning his head forward, his cigarette held in his mouth by a steady hand. He inhaled as the cigarette caught the light, and Thomas stopped breathing as he met his eyes.

“Right,” Richard said, pulling away slowly. “Shall we get it ticking again?”

* * *

**June, 1920**

It shouldn’t have bothered Thomas—it _ didn’t _bother him, really. Ivy was a pretty girl and Richard was a handsome chap, and dancing was what pretty girls and handsome chaps did with each other. 

Besides, he had something of his own. Or the beginnings of something, anyway. The hope of something, certainly. He had no reason not to hope about Jimmy. 

But his hands drifted from Jimmy’s shoulders at the piano as his eyes traced Richard’s footwork across the servants’ hall. He was no great talent at dancing, but he was a talent at charming the floor to disappear—Thomas doubted Ivy even remembered what a rhythm _ was _while in his arms, much less whether they were on it.

If someone more proficient was leading him, they’d really have it all...

“Ivy!” Daisy barreled through the entryway. “I can’t do everything myself!” 

Thomas had the distinct impression that Ivy would have kept up dancing if Richard hadn’t stopped. She didn’t look at all surprised at Daisy’s sniping. 

“I asked Mrs. Patmore if she needed anything else—”

“You didn’t ask_ me_, did you?” Daisy said, making a show of wiping her hands on her apron. 

“Do you need anything, then?” Ivy said coolly. Daisy opened her mouth, but she clearly didn’t have anything for Ivy to do: it remained conspicuously open for several seconds before she finally snapped it shut, straightening about the shoulders. 

“Well...I might’ve!” she said. Even with Jimmy’s playing, the room felt painfully silent. Daisy lingered in the doorway, as if she were hoping Ivy might come up with some reason to return to the kitchen with her. 

“Do you know the foxtrot, Daisy?” Richard finally said. Daisy looked at him with the same wide-eyed discomfort she’d always fixed William with. 

“I think so,” she managed. 

“You want a go at it?”

Ivy looked him over in mock offense. “Well,_ that’s _ nice!”

“I’ll say…” Thomas stood straight, taking his hand off the piano at last. “Daisy’s _ my _dancing partner, aren’t you, Daisy?” 

“Don’t tease her, Mr. Barrow,” Anna said from the corner. 

“I’m not!” Thomas said tersely before turning to Daisy, who looked less like a rabbit caught by a fox. “How about it?”

Daisy teased her bottom lip, looking from Richard to Ivy to Thomas.

“Go on, then…” she said, entering the room properly and joining Thomas. 

“And take care not to step on our feet too, Richard…” Thomas said with a grin as his hand found Daisy’s waist.

“Don’t be nasty, or I’ll change my mind…” Daisy was almost smiling, but she didn’t break her stare. 

Maybe they were growing up after all...

“She knows me too well, this one,” Thomas said fondly. “Right: Richard, Ivy...I hope you’ll make it up the stairs tonight, I really do...how was that?” 

Daisy searched his face in amusement before dropping her head and stepping closer to him. 

“You’re always so strange…” she muttered. 

Which, after everything that she knew about him, Thomas took as quite a generous assessment. 

Daisy proved as easy to lead as ever when it came to dancing, though she also seemed distracted. She kept looking over at Richard and Ivy, which made Thomas look over at Richard and Ivy...which made him feel that hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach again. 

“She’s done something to her face,” Daisy remarked suddenly. “Ivy—rouge or something, I don’t know.”

“Not _rouge_…” Thomas joked, steering Daisy clear of the table’s corner.

“Mrs. Patmore won’t have it.”

“If she had her way, Mrs. Patmore wouldn’t have the entire twentieth century.”

Daisy tore her gaze away from Ivy. “What did I say? About being nasty?” 

She was smiling too widely, and Thomas was reminded of an age ago—before the war, before any of them had known anything—after they’d come back from the village fair, and she’d stopped outside the servants’ door and wrung her hands and stared at him and it was like they were both watching each other drown. 

“And what about you and Ivy?” Thomas said lightly. “Don’t tell me there’s nothing nasty there...”

“I didn’t say it to be nasty…” Daisy protested. “She’s pretty and all, of course. It’s why you’re all sweet on her. I knew from the first she’d be that sort.”

Thomas put on a show of confusion. “I didn’t realize we_ were _ all sweet on her…”

“Aren’t you?” Daisy looked up at him sharply. Thomas laughed. 

“Well, _ someone _must be,” he said. “If she’s as pretty as all that…”

“Daisy! Ivy! To bed with you!” Jimmy stopped playing at Mrs. Patmore’s arrival, and as the dancers pulled away, a peculiar note of embarrassment filled the room.

“What’s that on your face?” Mrs. Patmore fussed, stopping Ivy before she could pass into the hall. Ivy’s eyes went wide, though if Thomas knew anything about Ivy, she was fixing to tell Mrs. Patmore the truth. 

“She’s been dancing hard, that’s all…” Daisy interjected. “Isn’t it, Ivy?” 

Ivy stared at Daisy in confusion. 

“I’m all red myself,” Daisy persisted. “It’s not in our usual way, dancing the foxtrot. Is it?” 

“That’s right,” Ivy said with a nod, finally taking the cue. 

Mrs. Patmore’s eyes narrowed. 

“Well...let’s just hope she won’t be _ dancing _ tomorrow while making decent people’s breakfast.”

Thomas turned to Jimmy as Mrs. Patmore pushed Ivy and Daisy out the door. Dancing had left him wanting to be settled more than ever, to have a real partner, not just Daisy. Even if they couldn’t dance in the servants’ hall, or anywhere else but in private. 

He’d done enough foxtrots in his mind with nameless, faceless men to be happy with any improvements on that score. 

“I’d better go up as well.” Jimmy was out from under the piano and on the other side of the table before Thomas could so much as blink. He gave a cursory nod when Thomas wished him good night, mumbling what Thomas assumed was the same in kind. 

Thomas watched him leave intently, breath catching in his chest. He didn’t notice Richard approaching until he spoke, pulling Thomas’s eyes from the door. 

“You’re a better dancer than I am.” Richard smiled. “I’ll give you that.”

“It’s not your fault. You were dancing with a girl wearing rouge...must’ve stolen your wits away…” Thomas said, sitting down at the end of the table. Richard took the chair next to him, turning it so he was facing Thomas. 

“Do you go dancing often?” he asked, taking the cigarette Thomas offered him. 

“Don’t go out and do anything often, with Mr. Carson at the helm.” Thomas lit his cigarette first, then Richard’s. He didn’t dare look at Anna in the corner, but he wondered if she’d seen the gesture—which by now was a matter of course with them. “Why?”

“It seemed like you had a fair bit of practice,” Richard said, reaching for the ashtray in the middle of the table and pulling it between them. 

“I read up on it, that’s all,”Thomas said with a shrug. Richard had put the ashtray closer to his side of the table… “It’s only keeping time, once you learn the steps.”

Richard nodded. “And you know all about keeping time, don’t you?”

Thomas reached over to the ashtray, eyes never leaving Richard’s. He tapped his cigarette over it before pulling it closer to his own seat. 

“I might.” 

* * *

**July, 1920**

Seeing Richard and Miss O’Brien talking in hushed tones in the boot room had been like a punch to the gut. Thomas had long put aside her threat to ruin him—perhaps he’d naively assumed that Lady Sybil’s death had given her a more measured perspective.

He should have known, should have seen it coming. Richard had been too comfortable with him, right from the start. Too familiar, too friendly...too kind. 

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing,” Thomas murmured while passing her on the stairs. She stopped on the stair below his, her face betraying nothing but concentration. 

“What am I doing, then?” she said carefully. 

Thomas looked behind him and over O’Brien’s head before speaking. 

“You’ve told Richard to chat me up, act all interested and soft.” 

O’Brien blinked. “Whatever would I do that for?”

Thomas shoved the question away—it hurt too much to look at dead-on. 

“Probably told him he could make first footman if he gets in with me,” he said. 

O’Brien’s gaze dug into his own. 

“Because I care so much about it…” she drawled. “Besides, he doesn’t need my help. He’s taller and handsomer, and they like him better upstairs. Her Ladyship told me as much. Mr. Carson does too, I’ll wager.”

She was still boring into him, making him feel senseless and small. 

“You should be glad,” she said, her voice softer and more chilling than ever. “Jimmy’s nice enough, I suppose, but he won’t be ready to be anything but a second-rate footman for some time.”

Thomas straightened. “That’s not for you to decide, is it?” 

“I’m only saying what I see, that’s all,” O’Brien said, stepping up so she was level with him, her eyes still fixed darkly on his. “And you’re dancing with Richard in your mind’s eye, I can see that clear as day. He’s the one who can keep up with you. Isn’t that what you wanted?” 

Thomas wanted to step back, but he didn’t dare give her the ground. “You think you can make a fool of me, and you can’t.”

“Suppose you’re just afraid of finally finding someone worthy of your attention?” 

“Suppose you’re a scheming snake who’ll get what’s coming to you if you don’t watch out?” 

“You’re the one about to be out of a job when Mr. Bates is done resting, Mr. Barrow,” O’Brien said, moving up a step. “I’d be worried about what’s over your own shoulder if I were you.”

Thomas let her amble up a few more steps, his left hand twitching into a clammy fist. 

“I won’t hold it against him,” he said. O’Brien stopped just before the next landing. “Richard, I mean. I know it was you that put him up to it. Besides, he’ll be in enough trouble if he’s put his lot in with you…”

O’Brien didn’t turn to him, but he could hear her just the same. 

“Put your lot in with Jimmy, then. See where being soft gets you.” 

* * *

**August, 1920**

“Imagine, having the same name as a film star…”

“I don’t see how it makes a difference, what name she’s got…” Daisy argued to an undeterred Ivy. 

“It’s romantic, I think...there’s so much tied up in a name,” she said, snatching up the last biscuit on the tray. 

Thomas sipped his tea, hoping very much that he didn’t look as bored by Ivy’s musings as he felt. She was the one who had asked him if he wanted to come to the pictures, and Thomas wasn’t in any position to offend the few people who bothered to ask him to anything. 

He’d only really gone because Jimmy had agreed to go...and Thomas suspected Jimmy had only agreed to go because it had been Richard’s idea, and he wanted to keep an eye on just how far gone the girls downstairs were. 

He wasn’t interested in any of them—he’d told Thomas as much. It was the principle of the thing, which Thomas well understood. You had to look sharp, when you were a footman. Especially a footman who had something to hide...

O’Brien, who had been “finishing” a stitch for the better part of ten minutes, kept shooting them both furtive glances, as if she expected something to happen right there in the servants’ hall. Finally, she stood and announced she was going to bed. 

“I suggest you all do the same...you’re late enough coming back as it is.” 

She didn’t wait to be summarily ignored by the picture-goers before exiting. Thomas watched her solitary figure disappear around the door frame, aware of what her departure meant. 

They weren’t being watched. 

“Might go out for a smoke…” he said to Jimmy, who was nursing a cup of tea he’d hardly sipped. “You want to join?”

Jimmy gave one last look towards the other end of the table—where Richard and Ivy were keeping up a lively conversation—before nodding and gulping down his tea. 

“We aren’t wanted here anyway,” he muttered. 

Thomas laughed, but he resolutely avoided looking at Richard as they passed. He hadn’t caused a scene yet over Thomas’s sudden distance, and Thomas was in no hurry to provoke one. Whatever he might have been told to do by Miss O’Brien, Thomas couldn’t quite believe it was Richard’s fault. She had a way of getting to people, making them do what she wanted without questioning it…

Perhaps Richard would realize that, in time. 

“I’m glad you came out with us,” Jimmy said, handing Thomas back his lighter. They both leaned against a shed wall, almost shoulder to shoulder. 

“Are you?”

Jimmy looked up at the sky, his free hand shoved in his pocket. 

“It’s what I said,” he mumbled. 

Thomas waited a beat so he could be sure his voice would hold. “Well, thank you for saying it.” 

“You don’t really think they’ll sack you, do you?” Jimmy said after a silence. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

Thomas shrugged. “If there’s not a job for me to do, I’ll have to go.”

Which wasn’t bloody fair, but His Lordship seemed determined to have Bates back, whether he was married and a murderer or not. 

“Well, I’ll be sorry if you do go,” Jimmy said, a hearty determination in his voice that Thomas had been searching for but hadn’t yet found until now. 

Even still, Thomas wouldn’t have forgotten the distance still to go between them if they hadn’t been standing so close in the darkness. The conditions were dangerous, but even he hadn’t realized how much until his lips were on Jimmy’s.

“What the hell are you doing?!” Jimmy shoved Thomas so violently that both their cigarettes dropped to the ground. Thomas didn’t get a glimpse at who had opened the back door before it slammed shut again, but Jimmy clearly had. 

“Daisy! It’s not what you think!” He ran a hand over his face, pacing, his whole body shaking. Thomas stepped towards him, his heart pounding so wildly he wondered how he was still standing at all. 

“Jimmy, she’ll keep quiet if I ask—”

“Keep away from me!” Jimmy flinched from his outstretched hand. “Just—keep away from me!”

“But you said—”

“I’ve said nothing!” Jimmy shouted. “Nothing like_ that!_ Now, go tell her to keep her bloody mouth shut!”

For a moment, Thomas felt his heart stop altogether. 

“I—” But he didn’t know what to say next, how to even begin. It was too late to lie, he’d made sure of that...and for most men, it would be no good apologizing either. 

Jimmy looked almost sorry for Thomas, but he hadn’t stopped shaking, and he wouldn’t look anywhere further up than Thomas’s chin. 

“Go, now!” he said. “Just go, Thomas! Go!”

But Thomas had no sooner turned towards the door than it swung open once again, Daisy tumbling out the doorway, followed by Richard. 

Jimmy swore; Thomas stopped breathing. 

“Mr. Barrow!” Richard had overtaken Daisy and grabbed a hold of Thomas’s shoulders before Thomas knew what was what. “See, it’s just what I said...didn’t I guess the minute you told me, Daisy? He’s already off-kilter…it’s all right, Mr. Barrow, just lean on me if you have to...”

He caught Thomas’s eye, cocking his head ever so slightly to the right, his eyebrows raised. And Thomas listened, leaning against his side as if he’d suddenly taken ill.

Once he let himself breathe again, he was glad of the support.

Jimmy, newly incensed by Richard’s arrival, had started on Daisy: 

“What’d you go crying to him for?!”

“Will you quiet down?” Richard said harshly. “You’ll wake the whole house...which is what she wants, I expect. It’s why she’s given him something…”

“What are you on about?”

Richard made a show of pausing, as if hesitant to tell the story that Thomas knew he was counting on telling. 

“You remember the other night, when they were talking about what happened to Mr. Branson a while back, before we’d both started? How that bloke slipped something in his drink to put him out of sorts?”

“I remember.” Thomas didn’t dare look at Jimmy—he didn’t dare look at anyone—but the furious tremor in his voice had dissipated. 

“And who seemed to know so much about it?” 

“She wouldn’t have…”

“She would, after Mr. Barrow got her nephew sacked,” Richard said. “As soon as Daisy told me, I put it together. The main thing is to keep quiet about it, whatever you do...we’ll have to think it through careful...I can’t see how it’ll help Mr. Barrow if everyone finds out.”

“Right,” Jimmy said at once, and Thomas shut his eyes tight to stop up the tears he felt coming on. “He’ll be all right?”

“Fine, once he stops thinking we’re all Ivy Close…” Richard’s laugh landed too thinly on the ground, but no one except Thomas seemed to notice: Daisy and Jimmy were too caught up in the sordid tale Richard had just sold them, and they followed him closely as he led Thomas back through the door and into the kitchen. 

“We shouldn’t laugh at him, it’s not funny…” Daisy said, rushing over to the sink for a glass. 

“It bloody well isn’t…” Jimmy said, and the bite in his voice was back. 

“Oh, don’t be like that...he couldn’t help it, could he?” Daisy said, handing Thomas a glass of water that he took in shaking hands. “Not if he’d been given something...you don’t think we should fetch Dr. Clarkson? Or Mrs. Hughes or anyone?” 

“They’ll think he had too much to drink…” Richard said. “We’d never prove it.” 

“But suppose—” 

“—give it a rest, Daisy,” Jimmy growled. “It’s like he said: better to keep it quiet.” 

Thomas took his water in messy, panicked gulps—he didn’t need to pretend he was ill. He closed his eyes again as Richard took the glass from his clammy hands (“that’ll help, Mr. Barrow, I promise...we’ll get you settled once you can stand easier”).

The voices of the others in the room turned to a hum as Thomas tried to stop his heart from jumping in his chest. No one was shouting, no one was angry...not at him, anyway. And if he kept quiet and still and said nothing, it might come off all right. 

“What’s going on, then?” Ivy’s voice tore through the delicate haze he’d surrounded himself in, and his eyes shot open. 

“What are you doing? You said you’d gone to bed,” Daisy said accusingly. 

“I dropped a hairpin when I took off my hat. Thought it’d be in here.”

“Oh, because that was really important, wasn’t it?” Jimmy scoffed. 

“—how was I to know there was some big secret meeting and all?” Ivy’s eyes landed on Thomas, who felt sure he’d be properly sick. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, praying that perhaps he’d already blacked out hours ago...fallen asleep at the cinema, perhaps...and this was all a dream. 

“What’s wrong with Mr. Barrow?” Ivy asked. 

“Never you mind,” Daisy said on top of her question. 

“I don’t see why everyone else should know, but I can’t.” 

“Because you weren’t here when it happened, and it’s got nothing to do with you,” Daisy retorted.

“But I thought we’d all decided to be friends,” Ivy said. 

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Jimmy said sharply. 

“Well, if we’re friends, then it’s my business if Mr. Barrow’s ill!” 

“Right, I’m taking Mr. Barrow upstairs,” Richard said decisively, and the whole room fell silent. “Daisy: you’d better tell her.”

“Not all of it!” Jimmy protested

“Oh, stop making a meal of it…” Richard said, clipping the words with a tight sigh. “Ivy, you won’t tell anyone else, will you?” 

“Course not,” Ivy said without hesitation. “I can keep a secret, as long as it won’t hurt anyone to keep it.”

Thomas would have wanted more reassurance, himself, but Richard seemed satisfied with the sentiment. He had Thomas hoisted out of his chair and halfway up the stairs before Thomas could manage any words at all. 

“I don’t understand—”

“—I think it came off well,” Richard said, glancing over his shoulder. “They’ll keep quiet, the three of them. All you have to do is act sick as you can tonight, and I’ll button things up with Jimmy before breakfast just to be sure.” 

“This might work for Daisy and Ivy, maybe, but Jimmy—”

“—he’s not half as clever as you make him out to be.” 

The terseness in Richard’s voice kept Thomas silent until they’d reached the bathroom door. 

“I only meant that he knows I’ve been acting strange towards him…” Thomas said. He was gaining his bearings, feeling less like he might slip off the edge of the world. Still, Richard helped him into a chair before striding to the sink. “He'll have noticed that...and now...”

“Whatever he might guess, he’ll want any excuse to forget this ever happened,” Richard said, his back to Thomas. The slipping away feeling rushed over Thomas again. In all that had happened, he’d forgotten that someone else_ knew _. 

“Why are you helping me?” he asked, hardly knowing where to look as Richard approached. His eyes settled on the damp cloth in Richard’s left hand. 

Richard knelt beside him, his own eyes trained on Thomas’s right knee. 

“Put your head down…” he murmured, indicating the cloth. Thomas let him set it across the back of his neck, the cold of it bringing him back to himself. Richard’s hand lingered on Thomas’s shoulder and the silence between them became its own sort of pleasant coolness. 

Finally, just before things grew too chilled, Richard answered.

“We have to look out for each other, don’t we? Men like us?” 

“Oh, God…” Thomas let his face fall into his hands. He’d known, a part of him had always known…

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’m a fool, I’m s—”

“I know what she did,” Richard said softly. “What she made you think...I wasn’t sure before, who she was trying to trap, but I see it now.”

“But I should have seen—”

“I think you did, in a way.” 

Thomas could hear his smile. 

* * *

**September, 1920**

Richard pulled a face in the mirror outside the servants’ hall, tugging at his white vest. 

“I look as if I’m seven and about to go to a christening…” he said. 

Thomas grinned behind him. Plenty had changed at Downton since the war—in the past weeks, even. Miss O’Brien had never been less popular—as it turned out, no one really needed to know _ why _both kitchen maids and both footmen avoided her like the plague; one breath of an excuse, and she’d been shut out entirely. Thomas had managed to make the most of his last days as Lord Grantham’s valet: he’d done his best not to be smug about his appointment as under butler, but it was damn near impossible with Mr. Carson and Bates’s heads spinning in his periphery. 

Richard, of course, was something wondrously new that Thomas had already vowed never to lose. 

One thing that hadn’t changed was Downton’s enthusiasm for the yearly cricket match...a fact Richard was currently lamenting. 

“But you haven’t tried it with the hat…” Thomas said.

Richard donned the white cap in his hands, sighing as he surveyed the effect. 

“Do I have to wear it?” he said, turning to Thomas with an imploring stare. 

“Now see here…” Thomas stepped towards him. “That’s my cap you’ve borrowed. And I happen to be fond of it.”

“Well, I’m sure you have a face for it.” 

“_You _ have a face for it, if you put it on right…here,” Thomas reached up for the brim of the cap, his other hand wrapping around to the back of Richard’s head, pulling the hat down and smoothing the top of it. His hands lingered about Richard’s neck after he’d finished. “There, now…I think it suits you well, actually.”

Richard smiled, inclining his head ever so slightly. “Do you promise, Mr. Barrow?”

And of course, they couldn’t do anything more, not there. But as Thomas traced Richard’s lips with his eyes and sensed Richard doing the same, it felt enough to know that he wanted to. 

They’d have plenty of time to sneak off later...

* * *

**September, 1921**

“She’s soft on him…” Daisy said, watching Ivy help Jimmy onto an “inside horse” on the merry-go-round (and of course, that _ would _ be Ivy’s solution to Jimmy’s insistence that he was “perfectly fine” to ride the thing...she was sweet as anything. The sort of sweet that used to turn Thomas off of people, but didn’t as much lately). 

Thomas laughed, holding a hand out to her as she clambered up the platform. “Is that what you’re telling Mrs. Patmore?”

Daisy went red. 

“You’re daft…” she said, though she was smiling. 

“I think we both know I’m not,” Thomas said. Daisy took her time ambling through the horses towards the others. 

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” she said, stopping in front of one with its tongue hanging out. 

“What is?”

She ran a hand over the horse’s nose. 

“How a part of you can know something before the rest gets caught-up.” 


	4. Out West

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are at Season 4! This was a challenge at first, because Thomas is barely in Season 4, but at the very least we know he went to New York...and that's where the fun has to happen, obviously!
> 
> I really hope you enjoy--it was so fun and illuminating to learn more about 20s American LGBTQ history...it's a forgotten period that was actually super rich and really great to play in. Julian Fellowes's loss is my gain!
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

**July, 1922 (New York)**

“What should I call you?” Mr. Slade—Mr. Levinson’s valet—took one of Thomas’s suitcases eagerly in hand as they started up the stairs to the servants’ quarters. 

Thomas looked him over imperiously. “I should think Mr. Grantham is standard.” 

“Not in America, it isn’t.” Mr. Slade’s genial smile remained undiminished. “We all have our own names.”

“I have a_ name_,” Thomas sniped. 

“Of course, I only meant…” Mr. Slade finally had the good sense to look abashed, though he recovered quickly. “Well, anyway, what do you want me to call you?” 

Thomas sighed. 

“Mr. Barrow, if that’s the custom…”

“It is,” Mr. Slade assured him. They stopped in front of a room that looked about half the size of Thomas’s at home, though the furnishings looked more cozy—Thomas could even roll over in bed without falling out. The luxuries of being in service...

“If it’s important to you, I’m sure no one would mind calling you Mr. Grantham,” Mr. Slade continued. “It’s just that it’s so impersonal...but Mrs. Levinson says the English prefer things that way.”

Thomas chuckled. 

“Have you ever been to England?” 

“No, Mr. Levinson isn’t a traveler.” Mr. Slade looked a little too heartened by Thomas’s engagement in the conversation. “We went to Chicago a few seasons back...he went all the way out to California, once, but that was before I started.”

“So not exactly ancient history…” Thomas quipped. 

He tried to make a thing of opening his suitcase and beginning to unpack, but Mr. Slade waited in the doorway for almost a minute before telling him they’d serve tea soon, “so we’d better get back down, I think.”

If this was how most American men were going to be...

“Did you enjoy the boat ride?” Mr. Slade asked. “I’ve been on a few yachts, but nothing like going across the whole ocean…”

“Well, the boat’s got everything you could want. Our liner even showed pictures. Though it didn’t stop half of first class getting sick,” he added nastily as they approached the kitchens. 

“Mr. Slade!” The voice of the butler, Mr. Reynolds, came down one of the halls. “Will you help with the grocer’s delivery? Frederick’s upstairs, the lawyers got in late.”

“Coming, Mr. Reynolds!” Mr. Slade said before shrugging at Thomas. “I suppose seeing someplace new must be worth the trouble getting there.”

“That’s what I intend to find out, Mr. Slade.” 

He wandered off, leaving Mr. Slade in the hands of the grocery deliveryman, who Mr. Slade seemed equally eager to speak with. 

“Oh, that’s Mr. Barrow, Lord Grantham’s valet!” he heard Mr. Slade proclaiming from halfway down the hall. “They’re visiting from Yorkshire...yes, Downton, that’s right!”

Perhaps he could duck out of tea time if he pretended to have a headache...

* * *

The subway ran all night, and Thomas had been encouraged by nearly everyone downstairs to catch a glimpse of the city while he could. Lord Grantham would neither know nor care one way or the other, so long as Thomas was back to dress him in the morning. 

He’d never known such freedom, which meant he didn’t have the first idea what to do with it. Everyone whispered about New York (though not quite as much as they whispered about Berlin); Thomas had read a scathing write-up in one of Lady Mary’s discarded magazines that made it sound as if New York held little else than people like him (“infested” had been Timothy Fox’s word of choice). 

But it didn’t much matter if he couldn’t bloody_ find _ them...though a few London seasons had taught him _ some _ tricks of the trade: he’d told Mr. Slade he was an artist at heart, and that had gotten him pointed to the West Village. 

“Just be careful,” Miss Reed warned. “There’s all sorts over there.”

Which had told Thomas all he needed to know. Even still, he’d expected to flounder a bit, to search—perhaps fruitlessly—for the places men like him flocked to every night. The searching itself would be an adventure, he told himself. One he could repeat every night until it returned the results he wanted. 

He’d hardly gotten off the subway before realizing that Miss Reed—and Timothy Fox—hadn’t been exaggerating. 

The people here were different, and they didn’t pretend not to be. When taken one at a time or glanced over thoughtlessly, perhaps they might be ignored, passed over by incurious eyes. But Thomas was searching for Different, and it hit him from every direction. 

The lightness in men’s steps and the brightness in their voices, the women with hands tucked deep in their trouser pockets as they walked next to flapper girls with men’s jackets over their shoulders. Two men whispering on a corner, so close to one another that Thomas nearly thought he’d stumbled into another world altogether. As he passed, he noticed one of the man’s hands clasped the other man’s waist under his coat. Thomas’s insides jumped, and he looked down at the pavement, half expecting it to have changed as well—the cracks gone vertical, the stone turned to green. Or yellow, like the story Miss Sybbie enjoyed so much. 

It felt almost a respite to slip into one of the corner establishments, which advertised itself as a café but smelled of cheap whisky. The people were still different, here, but at least they were all sitting down. 

Drinks were served inauspiciously in the back, while the front of the establishment was fitted for live music—a rickety piano and bar stool loomed dangerously close to the edge of a platform which appeared sunken in the middle. No one was playing now, though Thomas didn’t see how they could have been heard over the noise. 

Americans knew how to fill a place without filling it...Thomas couldn’t so much as hear the scrape of his own chair on the wood beneath it as he sat down at an empty table that rocked when he set his elbows on it. 

He took off his hat and pocketed his gloves, feeling that he should somehow try and look interested. But how did one look _ interested _ with these sorts of people? Was he meant to unbutton his shirt to the bottom of his sternum, like the bloke to the left of him? Perhaps tuck his right foot under his left thigh, like the bloke to his right? 

He downed half of his drink—which was too sweet and still burned in his throat—before reaching into his pocket for a cigarette and his light. That, at least, was something he could share with the room. 

Perhaps he’d happened upon the right thing, or perhaps some men didn’t mind that he looked all wrong, for it only took Thomas halfway through his first cigarette to realize one of the men from the back had stood from his seat and was making his way over. 

He looked like the gentleman from Italy who had tried to pounce on Lady Mary her first London season after Patrick Crawley died. Lord Grantham hadn’t liked him from the start, and Thomas suspected he’d have liked him even less if he’d guessed what Mr. Casella had done with the first footman (three times, if Thomas’s memory served him. Only one of which he’d really enjoyed, but that was part of taking what you could get). 

“Are you waiting for someone?” He sounded Italian as well—or somewhere thereabout (at any rate, he wasn’t American and he certainly wasn’t British). 

This cue, at least, Thomas understood. He cocked an eyebrow, tapping the ash off his cigarette before answering. 

“No one in particular.”

The maybe-Italian took the chair next to him. 

“Have you just come over?”

Thomas stirred his drink in hand, eyes never leaving the man’s. “I’m visiting.” 

“Break my heart…” he said, smiling so his teeth showed. “Where from?”

“England—_ Yorkshire,_” he added quickly, as the maybe-Italian gave him a look that said ‘well, of course.’ “Little village called Downton.”

“Little village called _ Downton," _ he repeated back to Thomas, sitting forward in his chair. “That’s England for you.”

“Suppose it is.”

The man turned back to the table he’d come from, nodding at the two men sitting there before turning back to Thomas. 

“We’ve got some warmer seats over there, if you’re up for it…”

“I might be.”

The man looked like the cat who’d got the cream as they both stood. He scooped up Thomas’s hat, saving him from juggling his belongings. “Can I have a name to go with the handsome face?”

“Barrow—er...my name’s Thomas Barrow…” He still wasn’t clear on how Americans did it...and he certainly didn’t know how_ these _ Americans did it. 

“So what do I call you, doll?” 

“Thomas,” he decided. 

The maybe-Italian nodded, sizing him up with the name now in mind. 

“Alonzo.” And Thomas did the same. 

Just like that, they were off. 

“So you finally got one to bite…” one of Alonzo’s companions laughed as they approached. His hair was long, almost to his shoulders, and he held his cigarette between two ringed fingers. 

“Harry’s our bohemian,” Alonzo told Thomas, ignoring his friend’s quip. “Then there’s Russell—” he indicated the second man at the table, a solid fellow with a close-cropped beard. “Russell’s a good time, but you’ll have to forgive him for what comes out of his mouth…”

Russell took a sip of his drink without comment; Thomas wondered if the joke wasn’t that Russell didn’t speak much at all. 

Alonzo pulled the chair next to him out for Thomas. “This is Thomas—he’s visiting from Yorkshire, is that right?”

Harry, who seemed a constitutional sloucher, sat up marginally straighter in his seat. 

“Dick’s from Yorkshire too, isn’t he?” he said. Russell shrugged, and Alonzo ignored him completely, his attention caught by a sudden flurry of motion on the music platform. 

“Oh, it’s starting!” 

But “It” wasn’t a band (though one of the motley crew took up playing a cheery tune on the piano at the audience’s insistence). As best Thomas could tell, “It” was a pantomime of a picture he hadn’t seen, featuring parodies of performances he didn’t know. 

The plot wasn’t anything difficult to follow: A Gentleman With A Top Hat sought the hand of A Lady With Dark Curls—the Gentleman moping tremendously, and the Lady tossing her curls into his face (she was much taller than him) and making much of the attention he (and the audience) gave her. Meanwhile, the hapless Piano Lad kept trying to keep up his playing while wooing a Buxom Belle who kept charmingly knocking into things. 

It took Thomas the better part of a minute to realize the trick of it—why the women towered over the men in the pantomime, why the Piano Lad’s feet hardly hit the pedals on the piano while he sat atop the bar stool. 

The women were all dressed as men, and the men were all dressed as women. 

Thomas clammed up, dread pulsing through his body. Anyone could walk in, absolutely anyone...he looked around the place, searching for anyone who had registered the danger in the situation. But all he saw was laughter, people calling out the silly dialogue written on overlarge cards held out to the audience by two “men” in police uniforms. At the very back, a table or two remained silent, their lips pursed and their heads tilted to one side. A woman who looked like Lady Mary whispered to her male companion, and they both smiled in a way that made Thomas feel ill. 

“What’s wrong?” Alonzo placed a hand on Thomas’s shoulder. It took everything Thomas had not to shrug it off. 

“Is it all right?” he asked—almost pleaded. “I mean—”

“—this isn’t England, Thomas,” Alonzo said with a grin. 

But that wasn’t enough to explain this, that wasn’t_ nearly _ enough. America was different, but it couldn’t be _ that _ different. 

“But how—?”

“Prohibition’s doing,” Russell said abruptly. Harry nodded. 

“The bars are paying off the police anyway, and the other patrons don’t want trouble if they can help it…” he said. “Everyone’s interests align, which means everyone gets what they want.”

“Some of it, anyway,” Alonzo said, squeezing Thomas’s shoulder. “You’re in for some treats while you’re here, and no mistake.” 

With no small amount of shame, Thomas wondered if that were true. He watched the finale of the pantomime culminate in the Gentleman With The Top Hat sitting next to the Piano Lad and wrapping a conspicuous arm about his shoulders. Meanwhile, the Buxom Belle and The Lady With The Curls had taken to helping each other adjust their petticoats by crawling underneath each other’s skirts. 

The crowd called out more things he didn’t understand, the fine-looking people in the very back looked as if they were conducting a mildly amusing scientific experiment, and Thomas was very near to deciding he _ hated _it all.

These people weren’t anything like him. They dressed up as fools and stood on corners and leered and went home with men they didn’t know a thing about. 

_ If only they knew what it was like to be taken by some Baron from Nowhere who shoves you out the door at two o’clock and blames you for staining the carpet… _

Russell and Harry’s feet were playing under the table. Thomas downed the rest of his drink, wincing at the bitterness the ample splash of juice couldn’t mask. 

America was just as vulgar, loud, and uneven as he’d always been told—as he’d hoped, in fact. 

He hadn’t expected not to belong. To be here and feel more strongly than ever that he was from somewhere else, that he’d lived a life no one else could understand.

When the show ended, he haphazardly followed Alonzo, Russell, and Harry, a part of him aching just to leave the way he came. Go back to the Levinson House and pretend he hadn’t seen any of this. 

He tried to mask his disappointment—it wasn’t anyone’s fault, after all—but he wasn’t accustomed to keeping the most brittle parts of himself in check, and he could feel his new companions pulling further away after each terse response. And the more they pulled away, the closer he lingered, fueled by a defiance that he knew would help nothing but was all he had left. 

They crowded into a back room of the establishment, where the pantomime performers were in various states of undress (Thomas had never expected to _ miss _ England’s sense of propriety). He couldn’t look Miss Ida Lane (The Piano Lad) in the eye, even after she’d dressed to her shirt sleeves and shook his hand vigorously. Henny Mabel (The Gentleman In The Top Hat) hadn’t even bothered with so much as that. 

The Girl With The Curls was sat in front of a wall of mismatched, crooked mirrors—though the curls were now sitting atop a faceless wooden head while their owner removed the rouge from his cheeks. Harry grabbed him by the shoulders, planting a kiss to the top of his head. As they crowded around him, he caught Thomas staring through the mirror; his still-painted mouth twisted into a knowing grin. 

“Dick, this is—”

“—Mr. Barrow, Lord Grantham’s valet,” Dick said, still eyeing Thomas through the mirror. “I caught a glimpse of him yesterday. Though I almost didn’t recognize him without the pout.”

And now Thomas could almost place the eyes that had shone under a cap, the smile he’d been too exhausted to register, much less return. Mr. Slade telling the grocery deliveryman Thomas’s name and business, while he’d determined to escape the scene. 

“You’re one to talk…” he said reflexively, irate at being recognized first.

Dick’s eyebrow raised, as if he’d uncovered just what he was looking for. 

“Bit of a shock for you, coming from Yorkshire, isn’t it?” he said, not waiting for Thomas to answer before returning to his unmasking routine.

“Is Melly still here?” Russell asked. 

“She’ll be next door,” Dick replied, blotting his wine-red lipstick. “Mickey turned up and’s with her.”

Alonzo pulled a face. “I thought they’d finished with that.”

“Well, they started it up again.” Dick smiled at the air of dismay passing through the group. “I know, but what we can do about it? Go see her...maybe it’ll spook him and he’ll leave for the night.”

“He’d better…” Russell muttered, the three of them heading off. Thomas felt more ambivalent than ever about following them, and none of them seemed fussed about asking him to join. 

Perhaps now was the best time for him to head back to the Levinson House without causing a stir...

“Sit down, stay awhile,” Dick said, indicating the chair next to him. Thomas complied, though not without aiming a barb: 

“Americans certainly like telling other people what to do.”

Dick laughed. “I’m not American.”

“Well, you’re hardly English, are you?” Thomas retorted. A Northern accent aside...

Dick’s expression went blank. Most of the stuff he’d plastered on his face had been stripped away—he was younger than Thomas had first assumed. 

“I’ve kept most of my manners, anyway.” His voice was light, just the tiniest bit sharp. “Mr. Barrow.”

And he didn’t like the sound of that at all. 

“Thomas,” he relented. Dick looked over at him directly for the first time, and he was close to smiling again. 

“Dick Ellis.” 

“Like the island?” 

“I changed it when I came over,” he said, starting on clearing the wreckage in front of him—an assortment of colorful pencils and tins of cosmetics Thomas doubted even Lady Mary had in her collection. “Decided if I got in the papers, I didn’t want anyone back home coming across it.”

“Is that so?” 

He stopped packing up to shoot Thomas a devilish grin. 

“No.” 

And perhaps he'd deserved that. 

“Do they really put this sort of thing in the paper, though?” he asked.

“All the time,” Dick said, and Thomas felt sure he wasn’t teasing this time. “Though not usually in the light you’d like. But it’s happening, whether they like it or not.”

“I’d like to see the day they stop choosing ‘not.’”

Dick laughed, and it was the first time of the night that Thomas felt seen without an accompanying sense of discomfort.

“Are you coming back with us, Thomas?” he asked, standing up and snatching his tie from a hook between mirrors.

Thomas took a breath before answering, eyes tracing along Dick’s collarbone. 

“Am I being asked to?”

Their eyes met properly again, and _ God, _he was nice to look at that way. 

“Yes.”

Thomas nodded, mind rather blank, before stammering, “I can’t stay all night—that is, I’d have to be back before the kitchen staff starts.”

He could be American, starting things off so forwardly, but Dick only smiled. 

“I promise not to keep you long.” 

* * *

In Dick’s West Village apartment, shared with Harry and Russell (and sometimes Alonzo), with its low ceilings and doors with hinges that creaked, in Dick’s bedroom that overlooked a well-trod sidewalk and noisy cab drivers, in his bed piled high with blankets and throws to account for the draft in the room, Thomas talked more with another person than he had in years. 

Perhaps he’d talked more than he had, ever. He’d said more, anyway. Heard more. _ Meant _more. 

It was a wonder they had time for anything else, Thomas thought, kissing Dick’s shoulder, moving across his collarbone (he already knew it well). But they’d covered so much, and it was only just getting to the time they’d have to part for the night. 

Thomas had told Dick about Downton, how he’d taken the first job that had promised to send him far away from his childhood home and his father who tolerated him less with each passing day. How half the time he didn’t finish his tea because once it stopped being piping hot, he couldn’t abide it. How he liked to be touched in bed—not as if he were all too precious, but with something other than a singular goal in mind. 

Dick had come to America after the war; he thought it had broken his mother’s heart, but he couldn’t go back to York after hearing what the rest of the world was like while in the trenches. He liked tea in the mornings (sugar and milk), coffee after work (no sugar and sometimes milk), and he hated American cocktails (though he sometimes asked for orange juice straight). He smiled into kisses and laughed just as easily with his clothes off as on. More easily, even. 

Only now had they reached the subject of the skit Thomas had watched that night. Small potatoes when it came to such matters, from what Dick told him. There were whole “balls” in Harlem, attended by hundreds, some of them thousands (though not everyone attending was “like them” so you always had to look careful). 

Thomas searched for a polite way to ask why _ that _in particular? What had caught so many’s interest about it? He’d wanted many things in life—far-fetched, silly, indulgent things...never once had he wanted to dress in pearls or skirts. 

...perhaps when he was _ very _ young, he thought, reminded uncomfortably of his mother’s small jewelry box hidden in her dresser. He’d stolen a silver bracelet, held it in his pocket for weeks, wore it around his wrist when he slept, and once to school, which is when he’d lost it and Ms. Fennell found it in the mud outside the schoolroom. 

They’d blamed Maggie for taking it out of the box, and he’d let them. What else could he have done? 

He wasn’t ready to tell Dick that story yet. Wasn’t ready to tell anyone such a story, or how he’d punished himself for it after. Killed the part of himself that was _ too _ strange, _ too _ off-center. _ Too— _he didn’t like to think the word. He’d long ago negotiated what he was allowed in this world, who he could be under the conditions he’d been born into. 

Perhaps some people were ready to do away with such contracts.

“It’s not for everyone, even here, even among men like us,” Dick explained. The extra weight as he ran a hand over Thomas’s back told Thomas that maybe he’d guessed just a little of the story Thomas wasn’t ready to tell, of the questions he couldn’t ask himself, let alone someone else. 

“I’m not sure if it’s for me or not…” Thomas said, before adding fairly that he hadn’t minded watching it, after the shock. 

“Even watching takes some getting used to, I know,” Dick said, hand still heavy on the small of Thomas’s back even as he smiled. “But if you ever decided to give it a go, we’re always looking for a vamp. You’d be perfect.”

And in spite of all he’d taught himself, Thomas grinned at the thought of him playing Theda Bara. “Because of my pout?”

Dick’s hand left Thomas’s back to run through his hair roughly, teasingly. 

“I knew you were doing it on purpose…” he said, considering Thomas with a closed-mouth smile, hand tracing the back of his neck. “You’ll come out with me tomorrow, won’t you? I’m off, so I can take you myself. There’s some things might be more to your liking…” 

“It’s not that I didn’t like it—” 

“I know,” he said, smile undiminished. “But I think I know just the ticket. Will you come?”

Thomas couldn’t say anything but yes. 

* * *

Dick wouldn’t tell Thomas a thing about the place they were going, only that he was quite sure it he’d like it much better. Thomas had little choice—and little desire—to do anything but follow his lead. 

Some blocks down from the street Thomas had found himself at the night before, they came upon a corner restaurant that looked perfectly reputable and non-descript. They followed a well-dressed man and woman inside, and Thomas watched as they joined a large dinner party on his right. 

“Two?” the waiter said, making as if to lead them to the right as well. 

“Any space on the left?” Dick asked, looking more at the ceiling than the waiter. 

The waiter’s eyes traced them both over. “Follow me, then...”

It didn’t take long after they sat down in a high-backed booth for Thomas to understand that this, too, was a place for men like them. They took one half—one third, more like—of the restaurant to themselves, and everything continued undisturbed. 

“We can’t be too open, even here,” Dick explained over a red wine that wasn’t half bad, considering. “The main thing is that no one wants trouble from anyone else. And it’s something—a chance to go out and have a time of it without so many eyes on you.” 

He didn’t have to explain any of it to Thomas, who could hardly keep from staring at the tables around them. Most were working class, like them, dressed for a proper dinner on a night out. They could be men from York or London, only Thomas didn’t know anywhere in York where men could hold hands under tables and lean so close to each other over plates of food. 

“You like this better, don’t you?” Dick was smiling at him, eyes soft as anything. “I knew you would. I hid out here for weeks before trying anywhere else. It feels like home, somehow.” 

“That’s it,” Thomas agreed. Like home—or the home he wanted so badly to have always had. It felt nicer than Thomas could have imagined, sitting with a man he fancied and just talking, knowing that they could do just a little more if they wanted, right here. Knowing that everyone there had guessed that Thomas Barrow fancied Dick Ellis, and no one minded. 

If he could have this always...that would be more than enough. 

“So if you started off like me,” he said, half-way through dinner, “how’d you decide to start dressing up and all that?” 

Dick sipped his wine before answering. 

“Well, these dinners are expensive to keep up for a grocery delivery man,” he said with a laugh. “And I’m good at that sort of thing—impressions and the like. Suppose I went to a few shows, finally, saw the talent and decided I could do it better.”

“So you up and bought a dress?”

He laughed again. “Well, I borrowed everything at the start. But yes, basically.” 

“But how do you manage?” Thomas said incredulously. “Being...well, like _ this _most of the day—just an ordinary bloke—then going and putting it all on for a few hours?”

“The same way we all do—we’re all pretending, sometimes.” 

“I’d be afraid of pretending that much.”

“Afraid you’d be caught out?”

Thomas shook his head, tossed the words in his head for a moment before deciding that he was almost ready to say what he meant.

“I’d feel like I couldn’t hold both those people, and something would give.” 

“I feel the same way,” Dick said, to Thomas’s surprise. He looked down at his plate, looking as close to unhappy as Thomas had seen him. “You get better at covering it up—maybe that’s why I do it, I want the practice—but it’s our lot to be afraid all the time, no matter what we do.” 

“I’m not afraid now,” Thomas said, not sure if it was true, _ exactly, _but wanting to put a smile back on Dick’s face. 

It worked. 

“I suppose the dinner helps with that, some.” 

“I know _ you _ do.” 

For the first time, Dick looked at a loss for words. He opened his mouth, then closed it, eyes never leaving Thomas’s. Thomas—who almost regretted such emotional sincerity—couldn’t have helped him if he wanted to; his own tongue had up and left. 

Dick leaned forward, finally, speaking lower than he had all night. 

“Can I kiss you?” 

Thomas’s eyebrows raised in alarm. “_Can _you?”

Dick surveyed the room, watched one of the waiters deliver two greenish drinks before disappearing into the back. 

“Yes, I think so…” he murmured, catching Thomas’s eye for reassurance before snatching up the drink menu, sliding out his side of the booth, and slipping next to Thomas. 

“I don’t like cocktails, much,” he began, making a show of pointing at the menu, “but I think this one here might be worth trying...not too sweet, don’t you think?”

And before Thomas could do anything but look at him, he was being kissed, Dick’s free hand brushing across his jaw, light where the kiss was hard...and then it was over, and he’d slipped back away to his own side of the table.

Thomas didn’t dare look at anyone but Dick, but it didn’t seem to have _ mattered _ to anyone but them. 

They stared at each other breathlessly, until Thomas’s mouth began to twitch into a smile at the sensation of getting away with something. 

“_W__ell_, Mr. Ellis,” he managed, and Dick laughed as if they were the only two people in the room. 

* * *

**May, 1923 (Nevada)**

_ “But how will you manage on the way back, milord?” _

_ “It makes no difference, now we’ve decided that I must. But are you quite sure you won’t tire of it, Barrow?” _

Of all the things Thomas was frightened of, growing tired of life had dropped off the list in the past nine months. 

Summer was coming around again, but the morning air was still brisk in the mountains. The West really _ did _have purple ones: Thomas had wondered. They had blue mountains as well—still capped with snow and shrouded in mist, with whole valleys between them. 

It was a lonely place, made lonelier by the fact that the sleepy mining town he and Dick were staying in had once held thousands on thousands of people. Now, it slumped and sagged and the church bells rang for some three dozen on each lettered street. 

But lonely was all right—even quite nice, sometimes—if you had someone to share it with. He’d never known London as well as he knew this place, not in half a dozen years of London seasons (a new one would be starting soon...Lady Rose would be bursting with excitement at finally being presented).

You couldn’t get to know anyone in London, either. There wasn’t time, there’d never been time. 

There was time, here, in the rundown, cozy inn on the edge of a steep drop-off. Time to walk along battered, shaded boardwalks, watching for patches of ice and holding each other’s hands in the desolate sunlight. Time to plan the next leg of their journey without a definite destination. 

They’d know when to stop, they agreed. They wanted to stop, someday. Find a home, a place where they could be both afraid and unafraid together. 

This was almost it, this place that felt like the end of the world but wasn’t even the end of the continent. Or perhaps Thomas only wanted to grow roots more and more at each stop because his heart was keeping up quite a garden of its own by now.

He’d never had roots before, a fact he’d had to face head-on when he informed Lord Grantham that he intended to hand in his notice upon returning to England. His Lordship insisted he stay behind—what a waste, he’d said, to bring him all the way back to England, only to cause a fuss in the servants’ quarters for a few weeks. He’d have everything he was owed, Lord Grantham promised, and his things sent over, if he would only send an address.

Thomas surprised himself with the realization that some part of him had both expected and desired such a reprieve from returning to Downton. Indeed, he almost hadn’t bothered with sending for his belongings, but Dick had warned him that he might miss something later on if he left it now. (For that same reason, Thomas had written a letter to Miss Baxter, explaining what had happened and wishing her well. If she was anything like the girl he’d known as a child, she’d understand what he meant in sending it).

“Do you think this is it?” Dick asked their fifth morning there. He hadn’t shaved yet, and Thomas hoped he wasn’t thinking of playing the part of a mountain man. The ruggedness was all well and good, but there were some things Thomas just wouldn’t get used to, and the West’s scraggly, unkempt beards was one of them. 

“Something like it,” Thomas replied. They were alone and it was cold, so he needed no further excuse to take one of Dick’s hands in his own. He’d grown terribly used to the feeling of their fingers interlocking, the squeeze Dick gave his hand every time. “Do you mind the work?” 

The jobs were thin on the ground, but the few families of means in town were eager, and they’d found both Thomas and Dick _ something _to do while they stayed.

“I think I will in the winter,” Dick laughed—even in May, his breath turned white in the chill morning air. It would warm soon enough, by the time Dick headed off to the supplies store, and Thomas headed down to one of the candy-colored Victorian houses for luncheon, to clean the silver or unload a trunk in the attic no one had bothered with in years.

“Then we’ll go on.” 

“It’ll be there,” Dick said, both of them looking out on a misty valley. “The right place.” 

Thomas squeezed his hand, pressed against him. 

“Found the right person, and that’s the hardest part.” 

He got a kiss for that one, long and open-mouthed and right under the sun. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Up next, Season 5...so we're really in it now...


	5. Seen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time for Season 5! 
> 
> A note on the format—I’ve tried to make it clear in the headers, but we do go back and forth between Thomas after treatment, and the period of time during his treatment. The afterwards part takes place from Sept-Dec of 1924, and the Treatment sections are all in July and are also labeled as Days (Day 1, Day 2, etc) 
> 
> If you’ve seen Season 5, you have a pretty good idea of some of the content warnings: we’re dealing with electroshock therapy (particularly the side and after effects of the treatment), internalized homophobia, some trauma—I have no qualms about saying it has a happy ending and some softness there as well—I don’t do bleak. But do take care if those subject matters might be upsetting to you!

**September, 1924**

“Mr. Barrow!” 

Miss Baxter caught him the stairs, already changed from her outing to Mr. Mason’s farm. 

“Ah, you’re back…” Thomas grinned. Determining to be friendly with Miss Baxter had been far easier than determining to hold her at an arm’s length. It had also given him far more entertainment than he’d have guessed—the plot to get her invited to Mr. Mason’s had been a particularly satisfying achievement. “Did you enjoy yourself?”

“I did,” she said. “And I wanted to say thank you for suggesting it. It was nice to get away, and it was kind of you to think of it.”

She was always so_ sincere_...Thomas didn’t know how much he cared for that part. But after how she’d helped him—saved him, really—he couldn’t very well say he _ disliked _ it. 

“It’s like I said: I owe you a good turn or twelve,” he said, before quickly turning the subject. “How was Mr. Molesley?”

Baxter went pink, pushing past him down the stairs even as her mouth twitched into a smile. 

“Never mind that…”

As they entered the servants’ hall, Anna and Bates stopped their hushed conversation, exchanging a look of distrust. So they still blamed Baxter for talking to Sergeant Willis, then…

Baxter put on a brave face, but their coldness made her smile falter before it had grown any roots. Thomas ignored them, sitting down and pulling out a cigarette before indicating the chair across from him. _ They _ certainly weren’t going to be the ones to leave. If Bates wanted everyone downstairs to lie to the police for him, he should have bought them all Christmas gifts...

Sure enough, the Bates’ chairs scratched against the floor as they stood. They left the room in a steady and silent manner that Thomas barely restrained himself from commenting on. 

It_ was _ his fault, after all, he reminded himself. And he wouldn’t help Baxter by meddling in it again.

“They’ll come ‘round,” he assured Baxter after they’d left. “Or Anna will, anyway.”

“I’m not sure,” Baxter murmured. “They feel betrayed, and there’s nothing I can do about that, short of what I already told them.”

“Tell them it was my fault,” Thomas said without hesitation. “They’ll believe that, easy enough.”

Baxter shook her head. “I won’t do that.”

“Even though it’s true?” 

Baxter’s sad smile made Thomas sorry for bringing it up.

“I just hope it doesn’t come to anything…” she said. 

Thomas leaned back in his chair. “Most things don’t, so the world turns in your favor there.”

Perhaps there was a bitterness in his voice he hadn’t caught in time. Or perhaps Mr. Mason had softened them all up at his farm. Whatever it was, Baxter sat forward in her seat—almost perching—as if the question she was about to ask was too delicate to properly sit on. 

“How’ve you been?” she asked. “Since…”

Thomas tapped the ash from his cigarette, not looking at her. “Everything’s cleared up.”

But he could see from her vacant nod that they weren’t nearly finished with this line of questioning. 

“If I ask you a question—only, I was reading up on...on what you went to London for—”

“—if you’re going to ask, get on with it.” Thomas tried on a smile, but it didn’t stick. Baxter paled, but pressed forward. 

“The thing is, I read about a woman in Belgium who had it done to treat her schizophrenia—she was a ladies’ maid—and after they’d finished with the treatment she forgot how to even make a proper stitch. She had to hand in her notice and go to live with her sister. I think she’s a washer woman, now.”

She waited expectantly for Thomas to respond, though she hadn’t asked anything resembling a question. 

“Well, if she was going mental to begin with…” he said, putting out his cigarette in the face of Baxter’s dismay at his callousness. He sighed. “Look, I’m very sorry for her, but that’s the truth of it, isn’t it? You can’t know it was the treatment that did it.”

“Maybe; but she couldn’t remember what they’d done to her, either,” Baxter pressed on. “Most people can’t. And I wondered…”

Still, she didn’t ask, and Thomas’s hand stopped its reaching for another cigarette. She’d backed him into a corner, forced him to admit to something he’d thought he could keep a secret. 

“Well, I haven’t forgotten how to do my job,” he said. “But there’s some truth in it, I’ll admit.”

“Meaning?”

Thomas bit the inside of his cheek, attempting a shrug. “I don’t remember what happened.”

“Any of it?”

Now that he’d said it, now that someone had heard, it was easier to go on. 

“I hardly remember making the appointment,” he admitted. “And I’m still not sure how I got back to Downton.”

Baxter looked ill. “God in heaven…”

Thomas stared blankly at the table, his right hand back to fumbling in his pocket for a cigarette. 

“Maybe it’s for the best.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” she said. “It doesn’t sound like a pleasant business.”

Thomas pulled out his lighter, pressing it tight in hand. 

“No, I don’t think it is.” 

* * *

**July, 1924 **

** _Day 1_ **

The dim, narrow halls and doorless rooms gave the effect of a particularly menacing boarding school rather than a medical institution. Perhaps that was how things were done in London...Thomas had only the village hospital to compare it to, the convalescent home at Downton. Not everywhere could be like that, surely. 

Still, seeing purposeless, rusty hinges still attached to door frames with peeling paint...Thomas might have been the protagonist in one of the short stories in _ The Lady_—innocent and recently come to London, about to encounter a murderous ghost that looked like his father…

Thomas clutched his suitcase tighter in hand, following a woman who called herself Nurse Cartwright, but didn’t dress like any nurse Thomas had ever seen. Her heels clicked in the halls, and the rings on her fingers suggested a wife of a lawyer or banker who wished to seem more important than she really was. 

It didn’t inspire confidence, but Thomas had gone too far to walk out the door because of a couple of rings.

“This is you…” Nurse Cartwright said, turning into one of the rooms. Thomas was reminded of the temporary arrangements in basic training before they’d moved his unit to the front—austere furniture, cots, and a chill in the air that came from rooms that didn’t ever get lived in properly. 

The cot against the left wall was already occupied by a man leafing through one of the pamphlets that had been at the front desk, his nose wrinkled in distaste. He hardly looked at Thomas and Nurse Cartwright as they entered; perhaps he’d already been warned, then, about the prospect of sharing the room. 

No one had bothered to tell _ him_, Thomas thought, fighting the urge to dash out as his heart thudded in his chest.

“You’ll be with Mr. Johnson. This is—”

“—I think I can manage my own introduction, thank you, Nurse Cartwright,” Thomas said quickly. 

Mr. Johnson’s brow raised, but he hardly glanced up from his pamphlet.

“Is it so full, then?” Thomas asked, a pleading note in his voice. “That is, I couldn’t have my own—”

“—we find that shared rooms increase the likelihood that patients will continue with the program,” Nurse Cartwright replied. 

His new roommate seemed to find this funny—his eyebrows shot into his hairline, his mouth shut tight to suppress a grin—but Thomas had worked in a hospital for too long to find it remotely amusing. Pain made people capable of drastic, devastating things. 

What they were embarking on would be painful. Whatever was to come, Thomas had no illusions about that. 

Still, it seemed most unfair to treat this sort of thing like he was having his appendix removed...though he supposed both he and Mr. Johnson had every reason to keep their being here a secret. More than Nurse Cartwright did…

Anyway, Mr. Johnson didn’t seem the talkative type. They didn’t need to mind each other at all, when it came to it. It was like Nurse Cartwright had said: people did better when they knew they were being watched. 

Thomas went to putting away his things, his hands shaking. Would they let him smoke while he was here? He hadn’t thought to ask before Nurse Cartwright left...

“You’re in service, then?” Mr. Johnson asked suddenly. “Only the way you put things out…”

Thomas blinked, not quite turning to face him. “I am.”

“London?”

“Yorkshire,” he replied, leaving a beat before asking: “You as well?” His accent was Northern, anyway.

“Well, I’ve been in London since the war,” Mr. Johnson replied. “Whereabouts in Yorkshire?”

Thomas turned to face him properly. “Whereabouts in London?”

Mr. Johnson looked almost impressed, his eyes lingering on Thomas for a good long while before answering. Thomas let himself enjoy the attention for an instant or two—Mr. Johnson was a handsome man, and a man he knew might be interested. Two things you couldn’t take for granted…

Two things he’d resolved to stop caring about past today. Thomas ducked his head, ears hot. It had been a long time since he’d felt uncomfortable about being seen by another man—and that’s what Mr. Johnson was doing, he was seeing him properly, as he was. 

But they weren’t going to see each other that way anymore, not if the treatment worked. And though the feelings Thomas was seeking to rid himself of hadn’t yet gone, they already felt estranged from the rest of him, unwelcome and aching. 

“Buckingham Palace,” Mr. Johnson finally answered, grinning at Thomas’s look of incredulity. “It’s true! Here…”

He reached into his pocket, pulling out a card and holding it out to Thomas. Sure enough, the royal seal was stamped across the top. But the name—

“This is a card for a Mr. Richard Ellis,” Thomas said. “Or did you think I wasn’t listening before?”

“Well, your head was spinning, so I couldn’t be blamed for it if I did,” he said, smile undiminished. “But I gave a fake name at the front desk, of course.”

While carrying around cards with his real name...they’d put him with a clever one, and no mistake...

“And they gave you the time off?” Thomas said, turning the card in hand. “King’s more generous than I thought…”

Ellis’s brow furrowed. “Is he? This isn’t exactly a vacation.”

“Well, you can’t blame him for that…”

He’d forgotten how cold the room was until it went silent long enough for Thomas to realize he’d said something wrong.

“What do you mean?” Only now that Ellis’s voice had turned guarded did Thomas miss the warmth that had been there before. 

“Well, I mean…” he stammered. “If this is what you’ve decided to do—”

“—_ Mr. Wilson_—King’s Page—decided this is what I’m to do,” Ellis replied bitterly. “Well, this or be dismissed with no reference.”

Thomas’s spine stiffened. “You aren’t here by choice?”

Ellis’s eyes were wide. “Are you?”

Feeling like he might sink into the floor, Thomas nodded. 

“I didn’t realize,” Ellis murmured, and there was a condemning note in his voice that made Thomas see red. 

“So someone at the palace caught you with your hands in the jar?” he said, reveling in the hardness of Ellis’s stare, in the way his chin lifted in defiance. Thomas wasn’t going to be the only one defending himself. Not when he was the one making his own choices about his life. 

“I didn’t get _ caught _ doing anything,” Ellis said sharply. “I know what I’m about. Only I got into some trouble with a few of the footmen, and they thought if they made up a story...well, it was me against four of them, so.”

Thomas frowned. “But you_ are... _” 

_ Like me, _he finished in his head.

Ellis took a sighing breath before answering. “Yes. They must have guessed it, I don’t know how they’d think of it otherwise…” 

He sounded furious with himself, and Thomas wished to God he didn’t understand why. People didn’t understand, they couldn’t be made to understand, how it felt to know that anyone could guess, if they really looked. The sensation that there was no hiding the truth from someone who wanted to find it.

“Isn’t it rather a risk, sending you up here?” Thomas finally managed. Whatever Ellis said, he still thought it a generous offer, given what the alternatives might be. “Won’t it get out?”

“I’m under a fake name, it’s all paid for under the table,” Ellis said with a shrug. “Out of my wages, I’m sure…”

“But you brought a card anyway?” Thomas waved the card that was half crushed in his hand. 

“I’m not going somewhere without my own name on me,” Ellis said, the defiance back in his voice. “Something happens, I’m not wasting away in here as Charles Johnson.”

Which Thomas supposed he couldn’t blame Ellis for.

“Did you really decide to come on your own?” Ellis asked, the disbelief in his tone neatly buttoning up Thomas’s period of sympathy for the man. 

“I don’t see that it’s really any of your concern, but it’s as I’ve said.”

Ellis looked surprised by his terseness, but not put off. 

“I should think we’d both be concerned,” he said. “One of us is going to end up terribly unhappy at the end of things.” 

Which pushed Thomas to reach into his pocket for a cigarette and light, permission be damned. 

* * *

**September, 1924**

Thomas caught up to Baxter in the downstairs hall, one hand still in his pocket, where he ran a finger across the edge of the card still hidden inside. 

“Miss Baxter, did you have a minute?”

“Can we poke in here?” Baxter indicated the shoe room. “I’ve Her Ladyship’s boots to do before her meeting in Thirsk tomorrow...what is it?”

Thomas made to sit down across from her, but his nerves kept him upright. 

“I was thinking about...well, what we were discussing yesterday, and I wondered if you might have some advice.”

“Oh?” Behind Baxter’s concern lay an excitement, one that Thomas was beginning to understand. She liked to be of use, after causing so much trouble at her last place. 

No one had less standing to judge her for that than he did. 

“I found this in my overcoat pocket,” Thomas handed over the card. “I didn’t think much of it when I was...well, when I was ill. But the thing is, I can’t place it, and I think...well, it must have come from when I was away.”

Baxter’s eyes narrowed as they scanned the card. “The Royal Household? Do you think they’d have let a valet away for so long, and for something like this?”

“I don’t know, but I can’t see what else it’s doing in my pocket,” Thomas said. “Unless I met him somewhere else in London—”

“—which seems just as likely,” Baxter replied, handing Thomas the card back before pulling Her Ladyship’s boots closer. 

“But should I try and contact him?” Thomas said, finally sitting down. “He must have meant for me to, if he gave me his card.”

Baxter hesitated. “What would you say?”

As if he were planning on asking outright...

“I’d be careful, of course,” Thomas said. “But if he _ was _ there, and if we _ did _know each other...well, suppose he doesn’t have a Miss Baxter checking up on him?”

That earned him a proper smile and a duck of Baxter’s head.

“You’re very sweet when you decide to be,” she managed, fiddling with a button on Lady Cora’s right boot for too long. 

“But do you think I ought to?” Thomas pressed. Sweet or not, he’d been driven to distraction at the thought of knowing a man_ like him _ well enough to carry his card around. A man who might have made the same foolish mistake he had. 

She considered it long enough for Thomas to feel assured she’d inserted the prudence he relied on her for. 

“If you can manage it carefully, I don’t see why not,” she finally answered.

Which was all the clearance Thomas needed.

Mr. Carson grumbled at his request to use the telephone (“_again_, Mr. Barrow?”), but as Thomas still had the excuse of a recently ailing father, he had little choice but to relent. 

“Royal Household, Mr. Miller speaking.”

Thomas stood at attention, as if that would help him remember what he’d practiced. 

“Yes, I was hoping to speak to Mr. Ellis?” 

The silence on the other end was anything but reassuring. 

“This is the number on his card,” Thomas continued, a sharpness entering his voice as he reached the limits of his knowledge. 

“Mr. Ellis doesn’t work here anymore,” was the terse reply. “He left some weeks ago.”

Some weeks ago...Thomas was surer than ever where he must have met Mr. Ellis. His stomach turning, he closed his eyes before speaking. 

“I see. Do you know where he might be now?”

“Last I heard, he went back to York.” Mr. Miller sounded as if Mr. Ellis could have gone to the ninth circle of Hell for all he cared. 

“You don’t happen to have a forwarding address?”

“For his mother’s place?” Mr. Miller’s voice dripped with contempt. “No, I’m afraid don’t have anything like that on hand.” 

“Not a name or anything?”

“I’m afraid not.”

He’d hung up before Thomas could say another word. 

* * *

**July, 1924**

** _Day 2_ **

The man in the cot across from him looked like he might faint—his face was white as a sheet, and he kept opening and shutting his mouth like someone in a dream who didn’t expect to be heard. 

Thomas reached for the two cards in the pocket of his overcoat, which he kept hanging on the chair beside his cot. He ran his thumb over the edges, his eyes going momentarily crossed before he could read them.

“You’re at Dr. Castor’s, for the ‘Choose Your Own Path’ program,” he said, reading off the first card. Ellis jumped when he spoke, as if he hadn’t quite noticed Thomas before. Thomas smiled, eyes darting to the clock on the wall. “It’ll be teatime soon.”

He flipped to the second card, reading off the name: “Try and rest, Mr. Ellis.”

Now Ellis looked at him like he’d come from the moon. 

“They were calling me something else, in the hall…” he murmured, dazed. “Jackson or..._ Johnson_, that’s what it was…”

“Well, Ellis is what your card says.” Thomas stood and handed it to him, ignoring the thud of pain in his head with each step he took. “You gave me this, didn’t you?”

“It’s mine,” Ellis said. Which wasn’t an answer, but Thomas couldn’t blame him for not remembering when he didn’t either. 

He pointed to the card in Thomas’s other hand. “What’s that one?”

“Card for this place.”

Ellis leaned forward, eyes intent on Thomas. “Are you foggy, too, then?”

“They did me this morning, so it’s not so bad now,” Thomas said. “And you gave me the card for this place. Said we should pass it between ourselves.”

Perhaps he was comforted by his earlier ingenuity, for Ellis looked more alert than he had only a moment ago. 

“And what about you?” he asked. “Do I have a card for you?”

Thomas shook his head. “I don’t carry a card.”

Ellis smiled. 

“Well, you must have a card, or else I’ll forget again.”

A rickety desk in the corner held a pen, and Thomas tore a blank space from a pamphlet on the desk, scrawling his name with a hand that shook. 

“Mr. Barrow,” Ellis said when he handed it to him, something in his voice that made Thomas warm all over. He read it over again, twice, maybe three times, before looking at Thomas. 

“I’ll keep it safe.” 

* * *

**September, 1924**

Mr. Carson glared at him from behind his desk, and Thomas wondered if this was the time he’d finally be refused the use of the telephone—he’d been expecting the pity to run out sooner or later. However, he’d hoped to have gotten through at least a few of the Ellises listed in the York directory before losing the meager sympathies Carson had given him. 

His phone call with Mr. Miller had left him more determined than ever to find out who Richard Ellis was, how Thomas had met him, and what had happened to him since. 

“Mr. Barrow, may I remind you that this is not a hotel, and you are not Daisy Fellowes,” Carson sniped. 

Thomas held back a sigh and stared at the wall just behind Carson’s head. 

“Yes, but this is 1924, and people do use the telephone, Mr. Carson.”

“And are butlers meant to be chased out of their offices while they do?” Carson retorted. 

Before Thomas could so much as open his mouth, Miss Baxter came barrelling through the open doorway. 

“Mr. Barrow!” she said breathlessly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Carson...but there’s someone to see you, Mr. Barrow. A Mr. Ellis.” 

She looked nearly as bowled over as Thomas felt at hearing her say the name. Carson grumbled something or other, but it didn’t matter now. Thomas hurried out the door, Baxter not two paces behind him. 

“Is this your doing?” Thomas asked as they rounded the corner. She shook her head. 

“He just came to the back entrance, asked to see a Mr. Thomas Barrow. I asked him to come inside, but he wouldn’t.”

Thomas nodded, swallowing back the fear that had suddenly overtaken him. In a matter of minutes, he’d have all the answers he’d been looking for...but what if they weren’t the answers he wanted? What if Baxter was right, and Mr. Ellis was simply a man he’d picked up before starting his treatment? Or something much worse, an indiscretion he’d forgotten, a trap he’d walked into while still in a fog? 

He held onto the feeling Mr. Miller’s derision had given him, ugly as it was. If he’d read it right, the most likely conclusion was still that Mr. Ellis had met him at Dr. Castor’s, that they’d exchanged information there. 

And didn’t that mean he was on Thomas’s side? 

“He seemed kind,” Baxter added, perhaps reading the concern on Thomas’s face. “And tired. I think you might have been right, about him being where you were.”

She slowed, and Thomas passed her up as they approached the door. He stopped just as he reached the threshold, more terrified than ever of disappointment.

“He was looking for you, too,” Baxter said. Without turning to her, Thomas nodded and wrenched the door open. 

Mr. Ellis wore his hat low, his hands shoved deep in his coat pockets, as if it were mid-winter. Tired was one word to describe him...recently laid up would have been Thomas’s phrase of choice. The hollows of his cheeks ran too deep, and his eyes shifted their focus too much, as if he were still too dazed to be standing up and moving about. 

“Mr. Ellis?” Thomas prompted. 

His voice trained Mr. Ellis’s roaming stare. 

“Mr. Barrow?” he asked, drawing a gloveless hand out of his pocket, holding a torn piece of paper out to Thomas. The outside fold was covered in terminology Thomas recognized from the pamphlet he’d brought back from Dr. Castor’s—the pamphlet he’d thrown away along with everything else. The inside fold read his name, written in his hand. 

Thomas exhaled—he didn’t have to ask, then. They both knew where they’d met each other. If they knew nothing else between them, they knew that. 

He pulled out the card he still held in his own pocket, though it was of no use to him anymore. Mr. Ellis’s eyes widened as he took it from Thomas—clumsily, as if he didn’t quite remember how his fingers worked together. 

“You left service, then?” Thomas began. “I was getting ready to look-up every Ellis in York.”

He’d said it to put them on an even footing, but clearly Mr. Ellis either knew more than Thomas or had been quicker about finding him. And he’d had nothing more than a name on a scrap of paper...

“Do you remember much?” Mr. Ellis asked, his voice halting in a way that told Thomas he could be truthful. 

“I don’t remember anything at all,” he said. “Do you?”

“Not much, no,” he replied. “But some.”

Thomas thought perhaps he should ask _ what _ Mr. Ellis remembered (particularly as it pertained to the two of them), but he was stopped from considering that line of questioning when Mr. Ellis spoke again, more to the sky than Thomas. 

“I think I’d rather I didn’t.”

Mr. Ellis tucked his hands deeper in his pockets, his shoulders high. And it _ was _ a bit chilly, now that Thomas thought of it. He hadn’t realized until now. 

“It’s cold out here,” Thomas said. 

“I don’t mind.” 

“You do,” Thomas retorted with a smile. “I’ll ask Mrs. Hughes if she can spare her sitting room, and there’s time for tea before I have to go up.” 

Mr. Ellis didn’t follow him back towards the door. 

“I forgot I worked at the Palace when they sent me off,” he said. “I came back home without thinking of it at all.”

Thomas stared at him, wide-eyed. 

“Do you remember it now?”

“Mostly, yes,” he said, “but they shove you out the door, and I was confused. Took a train to York, scared my mum half to death...she said I wasn’t to go back, after what they’d put me through.”

“That’s mothers for you,” Thomas said, though something in the sentence snagged, made him wary... what_ they’d _ put him through?

Mr. Ellis hadn’t noticed it—he wouldn’t have, Thomas supposed—so he pressed on. 

“I couldn’t manage as valet anyway, I don’t think. Not anymore,” Mr. Ellis said. “It’s fiddly things, I can’t seem to manage them after...what happened.”

Like stitches, Thomas thought, recalling the woman in Belgium.

“I’m sorry.” He meant it, though the snag was still irritating the inside of his mind. “When you said they put you through it...it was the Royal Household that made you go through with it all?”

Mr. Ellis had caught the snag on his end. He paled. 

“Didn’t Downton make you?”

“No,” Thomas said shortly, regretting his sharpness immediately when he realized Mr. Ellis took it as a condemnation and not Thomas’s silly, stupid need to be angry with himself before anyone else was. 

“Will you come inside?” he said, putting as much sincerity behind the words as he could. 

Mr. Ellis shook his head. “I don’t want to disturb—”

“—it didn’t work, and I’m glad of it.” Thomas stepped forward, feeling suddenly hot and breathless. “I was stupid to think it would. They took me for a fool, and I’m lucky it wasn’t worse.”

Mr. Ellis’s jaw tensed, but he was looking at Thomas properly again. 

“You were looking for me,” he said, and Thomas could hear Mr. Ellis reassuring himself with the words. Reminding himself that Thomas had _ wanted _ to find someone like him. 

“I wanted to make sure everything was all right…” Thomas said. “I made myself quite ill, with all those pills and syringes…”

“My mum tossed it all.”

So he had more than a Miss Baxter—he had a proper family. People who loved him, in spite of it all. 

Mr. Ellis had suffered too much for Thomas to begrudge him that...but he’d like to take it up with whoever decided that some people’s mothers were proper ones, and some people’s weren’t. 

“What’ll you do now you’re in York?” he asked. 

“Without a reference?” Mr. Ellis said bitterly. “I’m not sure. I have a cousin, works in a shop...he might be able to manage something for me.”

Heavens, he had a whole host of allies on his side...but if Thomas looked at Mr. Ellis rather than the gaping wound inside of himself, he found he was glad of it. 

Wanted to add to it, in fact. 

“Come inside,” he pressed. “Please.”

This time, Mr. Ellis stepped towards the door, though he stopped Thomas before they entered with a touch on the arm. 

“I know you were good to me, in there,” he said, smiling properly for the first time. “I remember that much. And I hope I was good to you.”

“I’m sure you were,” Thomas said. “Inside, Mr. Ellis…”

* * *

**July, 1924**

** _Day 3_ **

They only had to talk to the doctor today, answer some questions about how they were feeling. It would help solidify the treatment, they said. 

Thomas wasn’t sure what it had done but make him more tired and sick to his stomach than before. 

“You want it to work, don’t you?” 

His roommate—Richard Ellis, that’s what the card said, Thomas kept having to remind himself—was lying on his bed, face to the ceiling. He’d just gotten back from Dr. Castor’s office, looking ready to bite someone’s head off. 

Instead, he’d rushed to the washroom to vomit before tossing himself on his cot and staring blankly at the ceiling without a word to Thomas until now. 

“I do,” Thomas said. “I don’t judge you for not wanting it to, so I’d thank you not to judge me.”

“I’m not judging you,” Ellis said. Thomas almost believed him. “But can I ask why?”

Thomas let out a bitter laugh. “_Why? _I should think there’s plenty of reasons for that.”

“But which one put you here?” Ellis asked, turning his head towards Thomas. “Do you think it’s a sin?”

“No,” Thomas said. “But then, I’m not religious.”

“So what is it?” Ellis asked. 

Thomas closed his eyes, leaning his own head against his pillow. 

“Don’t you think it’d be easier?” 

Ellis didn’t reply for a long time—Thomas nearly opened his eyes—but his voice finally came through, solid and sure: 

“Maybe if we were born the other way first...but now? No.”

Thomas frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you’d always know what you were before, how you saw the world, wouldn’t you? How you felt about men—real men, men you might see or dream about or remember over tea. Do you want this to take that away, make it disgusting to you? Would that really be easier, do you think?”

Thomas shut his eyes tighter against the heated sting of tears coming from behind his lids. 

“I don’t hate myself,” he insisted. “I don’t hate what I’ve done, and I don’t want to.”

“It’s only practical for you, then.”

Thomas let out a shaking breath. “I want a life.”

“A wife, then?” Thomas could almost hear a smile in Ellis’s voice, but it disappeared before he could quite picture it. “Children?”

That word nearly undid him. It hadn’t been until recently, only in the last few years, with all the children running about the house, that he’d been filled with such an aching want. The kind of wound that hurt to look at. 

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to better your lot,” he managed. 

“But _ this_?”

“Well, when they invent a magic wand that can do it…” Thomas said bitterly. 

Another silence. This time, Thomas did open his eyes, turning towards Ellis, who was facing the ceiling again. 

“I don’t think anything can do it,” Ellis said, tucking a hand under his head. “After the war, I spent the better part of two years in the backs of churches, my eyes shut tight and my knees threatening to give out. And nothing came of it but bruises and self-pity.” 

So for all his pretending, Ellis wanted it quite as badly as Thomas did. Or _ had, _anyway, before giving it up as impossible.

“I told you, I’m not religious,” Thomas said. 

Ellis looked at him, unflinching. 

“But_ why _ aren’t you?”

Thomas couldn’t begin to go to that place in his mind, not now. He was too tired, and he didn’t know this man—this Richard Ellis. This man who was pushing him to stop wanting the only thing that might let him be happy. 

“What was his name?” he retorted, retreating to the smallest part of himself, the part that was always alert. “The man from the war who had you all broken up afterwards?”

Probably a man who went back to his wife and children. But even Thomas’s smallest part couldn’t bring him to speak that outloud. 

“Frederick,” Ellis said after a beat, raising an eyebrow. “Yours?” 

“There’s not one,” Thomas said, pushing back a thousand memories of men who had nearly loved him, who he’d nearly found happiness with. Men who had nearly stayed, who he’d nearly been enough for. “Not a real one.”

Ellis smiled. “Pretend ones, then.”

“I don’t see why it matters.”

“You’re the one who asked,” Ellis said, shaking his head, his smile still lingering. 

“I did,” Thomas said, trying on a smile of his own. “Don’t know why. Being silly…”

Ellis turned on his side to face Thomas. 

“I don’t mind it.”

* * *

**October, 1924**

When they were the only ones in the servants’ hall, Thomas could almost pretend he had a different life. Mr. Ellis—Richard, as he’d now asked Thomas to call him—sitting across from him with his tea, a biscuit or pastry Mrs. Patmore had shoved at him lingering on a plate. Miss Marigold tucked up in Thomas’s arms, watching him flip through the pages of her favorite picture book. 

“What’s that?” he murmured, pointing to the lonesome rabbit who’d lost his way in the snow. 

“Bunny,” Marigold breathed, tracing the picture before looking up at Thomas with wide, expectant eyes. A signal to turn the page...

“And there he goes…” Thomas said, pointing to the rabbit darting across the page towards a familiar looking hole in the ground, half buried in snow—it only took Mr. Rabbit eighteen short pages to find his burrow.

“He’s going home,” Marigold declared. 

“Where it’s nice and cozy,” Thomas agreed, holding her tighter. Though he knew deep down that of course she_ must _be Lady Edith’s child, a dreamy, wishful part of him wondered if Marigold had a way of making lonely people feel as if she were their own. 

Marigold looked between the hand holding the book, and the hand holding her. 

“You lost one,” she said, pointing to Thomas’s ungloved hand and looking up at him. 

“Oh, I’m silly for doing that, aren’t I?” he said with a laugh, and Marigold smiled. 

“It’s all right,” she murmured, turning back to the final pages of the book.

Thomas beamed at her before looking up at Richard, who was watching them fondly. 

“How are you, really?” Thomas asked, for Richard still looked pale and worn out each time they met—which was getting to be every weekend Richard had off. He was getting on at his cousin’s shop—selling things suited him—but Thomas had a feeling he still wasn’t sure of himself in the world. Not in the way he must have been before. 

“Better, when I’m here,” he replied, wearing one of his smiles that came around more and more often. Thomas had taken up the task of trying to draw one out as often as he could—it wasn’t difficult, but it never stopped making him feel warm all over when he did. 

“You’ll be all right, when we’re in London?” he asked. “I could ask Mr. Carson—”

“—I’ll be fine,” Richard insisted, taking a sip of tea in hands that wrapped tight around the cup. He was getting better with picking things up, but Thomas suspected his hands would never be able to do all they could before.

“You would tell me if you weren’t?” Thomas said, his voice treading close to a softness he tried to keep at bay. They weren’t lovers, whatever Thomas wished might happen. They were companions, good friends—getting to be dear friends, even. Richard was easy to talk to, and they understood each other. He took the time to ride the train to Downton each weekend, and he always had a story or twelve to tell about his week. 

Thomas had taken to collecting some of his own—new ones, like Daisy’s studies and Lady Rose’s soon-to-be husband. Old ones, too, like the convalescent home he’d run with Her Ladyship, the time he’d won the cricket match for the house. 

It was better than anything Thomas had ever had...but there was no promise it would be anything more. 

He was comforted by the warmth in Richard’s smile as he leaned forward, his cup still wrapped tight in his hands. 

“You’re stuck with me, now.”

* * *

**July, 1924**

** _Day 4_ **

Thomas sat up in bed with a start—he hadn’t heard such cries since the war. The late afternoon light cast eerie shadows on Ellis’s writhing form—he was upright in bed but hunched over, his head twisting this way and that, as if trying to find a position that would numb the pain that was causing him to cry out. His jaw opened so wide it looked as if he were trying to unhinge it. He’d move it to the right, to the left...nothing seemed to help.

If anything, he’d be making whatever was wrong worse by fussing so. 

Thomas, still groggy and uncoordinated, but moved by an instinct that hadn’t faded so many years after the war, hurried to his bedside. As he moved closer, he could see the swelling on the right side of Ellis’s face, the blood in his mouth that he was wiping on his sleeve. Thomas suspected a restraint had slipped during his treatment. 

“May I see?” Thomas said, reaching out for him.

But Ellis flinched from his touch, his own hands hovering about his face, fingers twitching, as if he were trying to decide if it would be easier to tear his own head off. 

“Just tell them to stop, just tell them to please stop, please, I can’t do it anymore, you have to tell them…”

He’d been away from bedsides long enough to wince at the blood Ellis spat out onto the cot, his stomach turning at the white shards that tumbled out along with it. 

“You’ve cracked some teeth, that’s all—” Thomas said. 

“—that’s_ all_? That’s _ all?_” Ellis’s eyes were wild and shining. “God...God, we’re going to die in here...I’m going to die here, I’m—”

“—you’re not dying, you need something for the pain, that’s all,” Thomas gripped one of Ellis’s twitching hands in his. “That’s all it is. That’s all.”

Ellis, shaking with sobs that had turned inward, fixed him with a miserable, knowing look that made Thomas cold all over. 

“What?”

“You hurt like this all the time,” he whispered, squeezing Thomas’s hand tight. “That’s why you think it’s nothing.”

Thomas pulled his hand away so quickly that it stung, and he pushed Ellis’s hair back from his feverish forehead as a balm. 

“You’re daft,” he murmured. “Lie down...I’ll fetch someone to help.”

Ellis lay still after a moment. But before Thomas left the room, he pocketed the pen sitting atop the desk. 

You couldn’t be too careful. 

* * *

**December, 1924**

“Was it a bit far, do you think?” Thomas searched Richard’s face for disapproval. It hadn’t occurred to him until halfway through his story that Richard didn’t know much of the Thomas Barrow who schemed and lied and used secrets in nasty ways. Aside from a few vague comments here and there in his stories of the past, Thomas had done his best to keep that Mr. Barrow well hidden.

He might have even fooled himself into thinking that Mr. Barrow didn’t really exist anymore, but here he was, sitting in a pub in York, telling Richard about what he’d done to Mr. Stowell (and Lord Sinderby). It had been at Lady Mary’s request, of course, but he’d decided the measure and the means. Both of which now seemed wretched and callous when put in front of Richard. 

But Richard only shrugged. “Not for them, if they’re as insufferable as you say…” He grinned at Thomas’s look of confirmation. “Though I’ll admit, I do feel sorry for the woman, getting dragged in…”

There wasn’t a single note of condemnation in his voice, but the sincerity of the words was almost worse. 

“She’d get the worst of it, wouldn’t she?” Thomas said, looking into his mug. 

“She already has; Lord Sinderby’s seen to that,” Richard replied grimly. 

“You’re cheery…”

“‘Tis the season.” And with Richard’s smile, Thomas knew his thoughtlessness in the handling of Ms. Clark wouldn’t be made too much of.

“You’ll come for the Christmas party, won’t you?” Thomas sat forward in anticipation. He’d mentioned it a few times to Richard, but he hadn’t properly asked him until now. 

“I’m not a tenant,” Richard said, not quite looking at him. 

“They’ll let me have _ one _ guest,” Thomas insisted. But Richard looked more distant than ever. 

“Don’t you ever worry what they’ll think, with me always being around?” 

Thomas leaned back, letting out a sigh. 

“Well, if they thought it, they’d be wrong, wouldn’t they?” He tried to smile, make it light, but it came out with enough bitterness to make him wince. 

It wasn’t Richard’s fault he hadn’t worked up the courage to _ ask_…

But Richard didn’t seem to have heard the discordant notes. 

“Suppose they don’t care much if they’re wrong or not?” he said, fixing Thomas with a look of such genuine concern that Thomas almost doubted his own instincts. 

He shook the fear out of his head. “They’re not those sorts of people.”

Richard gave him a dubious look. “Not any of them?”

_ Not anyone still left._

“No, I don’t think so,” Thomas said. “They’re not all..._kind _ about it, but they’re not...they wouldn’t behave like your people behaved.”

It wasn’t easy, to admit that he’d subjected himself to things even Mr. Carson would have protested as cruel. But he _ had _ to admit it, if he were ever to treat himself or anyone else with any kindness. 

“And most of them know?” Richard said. 

Thomas smiled. “I’ve worked at Downton fourteen years…”

“Upstairs, too? Do they know?”

“I believe so, yes.”

Richard blinked. “That’s quite a thing, you know that?”

“It doesn’t always feel like it…” Thomas said. “But I do know it.”

To have a place where someone like him could be _ mostly _ safe, _ mostly _ unharmed, _ mostly _trusted...it wasn’t to be taken for granted. 

It wasn’t enough, and it still wasn’t fair. But it was something—something he could share with Richard. 

“You should come,” he said again. Richard nodded, the fear in eyes not quite vanished.

“You’re sure no one will make a fuss?”

Thomas smiled. “I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t sure.”

He’d happened upon the right words, for now the light was back in Richard’s face. 

“Then I’ll come.”

* * *

**July, 1924**

** _Day 5_ **

Thomas put out his cigarette after only a few tentative puffs. It wasn’t going to help with his head, or with the fact that he might need to sleep until Christmas once he got back to Downton. 

He shuffled through his suitcase’s contents one last time, his eyes avoiding the case of follow-up medications Nurse Cartwright had given him. She’d been vague about how they’d make him feel (“better, Mr. Barrow, of course, if you keep it up…”), which probably meant they’d make him feel ill. 

As he closed up his suitcase, he heard cursing from the other side of the room. Ellis was fumbling with the button on his gloves—he couldn’t do it one-handed. 

And his card said he was a valet to the King…but after what had happened yesterday, Thomas could hardly blame him for losing his grip. He stepped forward, holding out a hand. 

“Let me do it.”

Ellis didn’t hesitate to let Thomas fix up his right hand, then his left. His eyes were shut—whether in frustration, in pain, or in weariness, Thomas couldn’t tell. Still, he opened them when Thomas finished, thanked him, and offered to help Thomas with his, if he needed it. 

“I can do it with two hands, so I’m not completely useless,” Ellis finished. 

“I’ve managed mine, actually,” Thomas said, hoping his exhaustion didn’t mask how touched he was by the gesture. “How’re your teeth? They said they’d give you something for it.”

Ellis’s face went blank. 

“I don’t know what they did,” he said. “It still hurts.”

“Not as much as before,” Thomas said, returning to his cot and pulling his suitcase off of it. 

Ellis didn’t move, and he stared at the wall for a long time before answering. 

“I don’t know.”

Nurse Cartwright poked her head in. 

“Mr. Barrow, Mr. Johnson...we’ll need the room.”

Thomas waited for Ellis to gather his things before following him out the always open doorway. Before he could finish pondering how to say goodbye, they’d left the building, Ellis taking a sharp turn to the left while Thomas reached into his pocket for the return ticket he’d purchased—the ten o’clock to Downton Station. 

By the time he looked up again, Richard Ellis had disappeared. 

* * *

**Christmas, 1924**

“Lord Grantham’s had a bit to drink,” Richard laughed as they clambered down the stairs towards the servants’ hall. 

“He hasn’t, that’s the thing,” Thomas said. “It’s only that he stopped drinking because of his ulcer, and now he’s a lightweight.” 

He let Richard pass through the doorway first, his excitement mounting as he held the wrapped parcel he’d just fetched up from his room tighter in hand. He hadn’t given anyone a Christmas present in years, and this Christmas he’d needed to find two gifts. 

He’d already given Baxter the hat he’d caught her eyeing while they were both in York—him to visit Richard on a half-day, her tagging along with Molesley on their mad mission to visit every pub in town. She’d kissed him on the cheek for it, which Thomas had liked more than he let on. 

If he could work up the nerve, Thomas hoped to have another kiss by the end of the night—preferably a less platonic one this time around. He didn’t think he was imagining how Richard had begun to lean towards him when they spoke, how close he kept their bodies when they walked together...and there’d always been something in his eyes that Thomas wanted to believe was more than a general fondness. 

He was ready for an answer, whether it was the one he wanted or not. 

Richard sat next to him at the table, reaching for the present he’d left downstairs when they’d joined the upstairs party. 

“You can open it later, when it’s a bit quieter,” he’d told Thomas, which had set quite the encouraging tone for the evening. 

Thomas handed him the gift he’d been holding. 

“You first,” he said, hoping Richard didn’t question his enthusiasm. It was routine for most people, he supposed—giving and receiving gifts on Christmas. Just another thing he’d assumed he couldn’t ever understand. Not because he didn’t want to, but because there was a cog missing, a piece that he needed to set things in motion: people who wanted something from him that they were willing to return. 

A simple thing, really, but he hadn’t had it until now, and he intended to enjoy it all the more for finding it at such a late hour. 

Richard grinned at the excitement in his voice, and he didn’t argue the ordering of things. He handled the unwrapping with care—his hands still trembled, went right when he wanted them left—but he managed it without too much trouble. He lifted the lid of the small rectangular box, revealing the dark blue pair of gloves inside. 

Thomas searched his face hungrily as Richard took one from the box, but for the moment his expression was inscrutable. 

“No buttons…” Richard murmured, slipping it on as easily as the man in the shop had promised he would. They made all sorts since the war, he’d told Thomas, after so many men came back with shaking hands, with stiff or missing fingers.

It was a funny thing, really—Thomas had struggled with his own gloves for eight years, never thinking anything of it. Now he had a pair of his own upstairs—chestnut brown, he could pull them on in his sleep. 

“They go on easier,” Thomas explained, as Richard reached for the second one and slipped it on, studying the effect. “But they’re still sharp, I think.”

“They are, very.” Richard’s voice shook. “Thank you, Thomas.”

He pulled them off and folded them carefully back into the box before closing the lid again. Only then did he fix Thomas with a wide smile. 

“Now it’s your turn,” he said, pushing the present towards him—a parcel that looked suspiciously like a book (though not nearly so thick as the novel Baxter had gotten him). 

But the leather bound book inside had no title, and Thomas looked at Richard, puzzled. 

“Open it,” he pressed, his face the picture of anticipation. 

The book was filled with drawings—and it didn’t take more than flipping through the first few pages for Thomas to realize what they were drawings of. 

They were his stories—the stories he’d brought to tea, on visits to York on his day off. Stories he remembered telling, and stories he didn’t. 

The faces were indistinct, often hidden, but every other detail rang true. Soldiers playing cards in the library in a drawing with note reading, “Downton Becomes A Convalescent Home, 1917.” A cricket match played on the Downton field (“A Game Well Played, 1920”). A dark-haired man sitting at a table with a little girl on his lap, a book laid out in front of them (“Tea With Mr. Barrow, 1924”). 

Something about seeing his name made Thomas stop turning the pages, his breath halting in his chest. 

“How did you…?” 

“I didn’t do them, of course,” Richard said, misunderstanding the question, but supplying a much needed answer nonetheless (last Thomas had seen, he still took his time writing a short letter). “Asked a friend to do up the pictures. Someone like us, in York.”

“But you...you told him all of it, you _ knew _how to show him…”

He’d listened. He’d understood. He’d seen it, all of it. 

Thomas closed the book, unsure of how to begin to thank him.

“Sometimes men like us...life feels like it passes without touching us,” Richard said, his voice filling the silence perfectly. “But it does. It has.”

Thomas blinked back the tears that had come to his eyes. 

“And I got you gloves…”

Richard shook his head. “You gave me what I gave you. It comes to the same thing.” 

“What’s that?”

“Seeing what someone needs, and offering it to them right-out.” Richard leaned towards him as he spoke, ever so slightly. Thomas wondered if he noticed. “That’s all a gift is.”

Thomas smiled. “You make it sound so daring.”

“Life has to be, sometimes,” Richard said with a grin. “Else we won’t feel it.”

He was closer than ever, and a shared glance towards the doorway of the servants’ hall was all the prompting Thomas needed to find a little more daring of his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading!


	6. Shadows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s the final season! After the rough road that was Season 5, I took a less strenuous track with this one—allusions to the canon content of Season 6 DO come up, so there’s new tags indicating allusions to canon suicide attempts and depressive episodes...but it’s a little veiled from the direct content of the story. Please do let me know if you need any further context! I’d be happy to give it.

**September, 1925**

“There you are.” Anna smiled at Thomas’s entrance into the servants’ hall. “We’d wondered where you got to.”

It was good that they’d gone back to wondering, rather than the hovering of the past few weeks. It provided proof of his progress, an assurance that the sky hadn’t fallen in. 

Most of all, it was something Thomas was going to have to get used to. 

“I was just packing,” he said, lingering by the chair across from her, but not sitting down. He’d missed tea, anyway. 

He hadn’t meant to, at first. But then he’d looked at the clock, saw he was late...and something about arriving late to his last afternoon tea seemed impossible to bear. 

Only Anna still remained in the servants’ hall, and it was hard enough facing her pitying stare. 

“That’s right—you’re off tomorrow.” 

Funny, that others needed to be reminded when it was all he could think about. When he could manage it, Thomas tried not to resent them. It wasn’t their fault; he’d even reached a place where he’d accepted that it wasn’t_ his _ fault, either. 

He lived here because he had a job to do, a job that was no longer required. Nothing more, nothing less. 

“I am,” he said, doing a poor job of masking the sigh in his voice. 

“It’s hard to say goodbye, but remember: you’re not just leaving something behind,” Anna said. “You’re landing somewhere new, and that means possibilities.”

“I know.” His possibilities rarely turned out well enough for Thomas to be excited about the prospect—but there was one thing, at least, he _ could _control. One thing he could almost say he was looking forward to. 

He finally sat down across from Anna. 

“I was thinking about what you said—about why I’ve been so low…I might try being someone different at my new place.” 

Anna frowned. “What do you mean, different?” 

“Someone better.” 

Anna’s brow stayed knit. “Do you need to be different to do that?” 

“Maybe _ you _don’t…” Thomas scoffed. Perhaps she thought he couldn’t manage it…

She was wrong, then. They always underestimated him when it came to matters of will. And they gave him no credit at all when it came to matters of the heart. 

“You mustn’t be too hard on yourself,” Anna said, that pitying look back in her eyes. “You’ve gotten yourself this far.”

“Don’t I know it…”

“Thomas.” He looked straight at her, and from this vantage point, he didn’t feel at all underestimated. Quite the opposite—it was as if Anna was looking to a part of him that he wasn’t sure existed—something solid and capable. 

“I only mean that perhaps you’d do better not to think of it as you needing to be _ different_, exactly,” she said. “Maybe think of it more like getting off on the right foot. You already have one of those.”

“Do I?” In any case, Thomas wasn’t sure he saw the difference. 

“You do,” she said with a smile. “And it’ll be easy to use it, if you pay things some mind. Now, we’d better get on...”

* * *

It took three hours for Thomas to exhaust all the possibilities the Stiles House had to offer. Two and a half hours, if he didn’t count the time he’d spent unpacking. 

Lady Stiles was old, and Sir Mark was even older—which for the aristocracy meant they were blind and deaf in every sense of the word. Thomas supposed he could serve dinner cross-eyed, and they wouldn’t notice a thing. 

The house was too hot in some rooms, too cold in others, and hollow throughout. Even downstairs, Thomas could find no respite from the emptiness in the house. The cook—Mrs. Jenkins—seemed nice enough, but she was almost older than Mr. Carson (and—Thomas hated to admit it—proving even more difficult to make conversation with). 

In all, not a promising start.

“The maid, Elsie, will be in soon. She can help,” Sir Mark said at the close of a solitary luncheon (Lady Stiles had a tray taken up to her room, as her hip was acting up). 

“Is that it, Sir Mark?” Thomas said, a barely contained sigh lurking in his voice. “Mrs. Jenkins, me, and Elsie?”

He might as well have asked for the moon, for the look Sir Mark gave him. 

“Yes. This is not 1850, you know.” 

Thomas held in another sigh as the door clicked shut. He wandered towards the window—the outside of the estate was something to look at, at least. Some places were like that—all green and flowery on the outside, while the inside grew dusty and vacant. Places where the real head of the house seemed to be the—

_ gardener._

Thomas’s heart jumped in his chest as he caught a glimpse of a man amongst the Cornelia roses, trimming around the blooms that still remained. A handsome man, who seemed to know what he was about, his face fixed in concentration as his hands moved deftly through the bushes. A man who noticed Thomas staring before Thomas had quite woken up from his daze.

He grinned at Thomas, holding up a gloved hand in greeting. Thomas gave a stifled sort of nod in return, and the man returned to the roses with a smile still on his face. 

Thomas spun on his heel and hurried out the door Sir Mark had just shut. 

As Sir Mark moved about in a kind of shuffle, Thomas’s haste proved unnecessary—he’d hardly reached the staircase when Thomas caught up with him. 

“Sir Mark...who is that outside?”

For a moment, Sir Mark fixed him with another look that suggested he thought Thomas was a little dense—Thomas could see the wheels turning in his head as he remembered how his own house was run. 

“Oh, that’s Ellis,” he said, almost gruffly, as though it were Thomas’s fault he’d forgotten. “He comes three times a week, just to keep up the gardens. I’d cut back on it all, but Lady Stiles is particular about the flowers. And we must give her own way in some things, I suppose…”

He almost smiled, and Thomas found he didn’t have to force his own. 

“Quite right, sir.”

Downstairs, Mrs. Jenkins was busy over a pot of soup leftover from the night before. 

“When Elsie arrives, we’ll have luncheon,” she said by way of greeting. Thomas nodded, distracted. 

“Does the gardener ever eat with us?” he asked. “Mr. Ellis?”

If he’d asked such a question at Downton, Mrs. Patmore would have given him a looking over that felt like a smack (she hadn’t meant to do it, Thomas always told himself). But Mrs. Jenkins hardly looked up. 

“Oh, I daresay he’ll stop in, he usually does.”

“And do we_ like _ him stopping in, Mrs. Jenkins?” Thomas asked lightly. 

“We do; he livens things up, some,” Mrs. Jenkins replied. “But if you’d rather we kept it to the indoor staff—”

“—no, no!” Thomas interrupted. He went red about the ears—there was no need to be boyish about it...he was the butler, after all. He rolled his shoulders back, lifted his chin. “Not if he’s good company. There’s always room for that.”

Elsie arrived first, and Thomas was grateful to see another person under sixty in the house. She greeted Thomas in a way that suggested she’d been looking forward to having someone else in charge, and there was a boldness to her that Thomas had seen in the newest maids at Downton as well. It came from living away from the estate, he supposed. Elsie lived just inside of Escrick, with a husband and two children—who from the sound of it were quite young. 

“It’s always a war, with two…” she complained as they sat down in the servants’ hall. “I don’t know why I went ahead with another one.”

“Where do they go when you’re working?” Thomas asked. 

“Oh, one of the neighbors takes them, usually,” she said. “Or else they can stay with my sister, though I don’t look forward to that walk…she’s clear on the other side of the park...”

Thomas took the bowl Mrs. Jenkins handed him, trying not to think anything of it when she plopped down next to him with her own. He could hardly ask her to eat in the kitchen alone…

“You don’t ever bring them here?” he asked. It wasn’t as though there wasn’t space for them downstairs...and it would make the house less lonely, having them around. 

“Oh, I don’t think Sir Mark would like that,” Elsie said, exchanging a look with Mrs. Jenkins. “He’s not fond of children, says he had plenty of that nonsense with his own...and poor Mrs. Jenkins would get stuck with making sure Arthur didn’t topple a chair on top of himself...that boy…”

She shook her head, swallowing a mouthful of soup that was too hot. As she sputtered, a voice came from behind Thomas. 

“Another sleepless night, then?” 

Thomas whirled around, knowing before he clamped eyes on the man who the voice must belong to. Sure enough, Mr. Ellis stood in the doorway, cap in his hands, his face still flushed from the incoming autumn winds. 

“You’re nice…” Elsie finally managed, though she was smiling. “Have you met Mr. Barrow yet?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Mr. Ellis said, shooting Thomas a knowing grin. “You’re the new butler?”

“I am,” Thomas said, feeling for the first time that the title meant something. “And you’re Mr. Ellis, I take it?”

“I am.” He kept his stare just long enough for Thomas to feel he was losing his breath, then took his seat next to Elsie. “It looks wonderful, Mrs. Jenkins.”

“Oh, don’t act like you haven’t seen it before…” Mrs. Jenkins said. “I don’t have that many tricks up my sleeve.”

“But it never disappoints,” Mr. Ellis said, buttoning up his flattery before turning back to Thomas. “Elsie told me they’d poached you from Downton. How did they manage that?”

It was the first question he’d been asked all day that indicated Thomas had any past. 

“Well, I was _ encouraged _to look for another place,” he said, stirring his soup and watching the steam rise. “Not many houses with an under-butler these days.”

Mr. Ellis nodded. “And the butler didn’t look as if he was ready to give it up?”

“Mr. Carson won’t leave until they have to carry him out,” Thomas sniped without thinking. 

Different. He’d resolved to be different. And different meant not speaking ill of people who had—after everything—wished him well. 

“Well, he’ll have felt a chill pass through him just now, at any rate,” Mr. Ellis laughed, looking the furthest thing from put off. 

“He’s all right, really…” Thomas said feebly, before turning his attention towards Elsie’s persistent complaining about her son. 

“—and I don’t know how much longer Mrs. Astor will put up with him, I really don’t…” she said. “He’s become a terror since he turned two—”

“—I keep telling you, Elsie: he’s bored out there,” Mr. Ellis said. “Bring him here, let him run it off, he’ll be napping half the afternoon.” 

Elsie scoffed. 

“What do you know about it?”

Thomas thought he saw something in Mr. Ellis’s face crush in on itself, but it disappeared before he could be sure.

“I was a boy, wasn’t I?” he said, looking nowhere in particular. 

Elsie shrugged. “Well, Mr. Barrow agrees with you, anyway.”

Mr. Ellis looked over at Thomas with some enthusiasm, but was interrupted when Mrs. Jenkins said: 

“Men always have big ideas about children, but who will get stuck taking care of them?”

“Exactly,” Elsie said with a laugh that Thomas was already tired of. 

Different. He was going to be different, and Elsie was perfectly nice and it wasn’t her fault that—

“Now, really, are Mr. Barrow and I to get no credit?” Mr. Ellis said, and though he was smiling, there was something rough in his voice—as if he were trying to sound heartier than he felt. 

“Not until you’ve families of your own,” Elsie said, as if it were nothing.

Mr. Ellis shot Thomas a look of unqualified frustration before turning to his soup. 

* * *

Thomas closed his fingers tight around the stack of letters he was carrying through the village. Perhaps he’d been silly, writing so many; surely just one would have served for downstairs, and the children wouldn’t be able to read their own anyway (except Miss Sybbie, who was taking to reading like a duck to water). 

They’d written their own letters to _ him_, Thomas told himself—Anna and Baxter and Mrs. Hughes. Even Andy had managed a letter (aided by Daisy’s hand, it looked like). 

Still, it felt ridiculous, somehow, holding so many letters at once, all of them going to the same house, to people who would all talk about what he’d written anyway. And did he really have so much to say, that it warranted so many letters? 

He passed by the Escrick post office box, eyes fixed straight ahead. He’d pick up the things Mrs. Jenkins had asked for, and then decide whether to post them afterwards. 

It would probably be better if he didn’t...they’d done their duty in writing to wish him well, and he’d only make them regret it by going on so—

“Mr. Barrow!” Thomas turned to the voice that came from his left. It was Mr. Ellis, striding up one of the cross streets toward him. He was smiling as genially as ever, and Thomas’s heart jumped in his chest. He cut quite a figure, all buttoned up and neat. 

“Mrs. Jenkins have you running errands?” Mr. Ellis said as he approached. “She was always getting Mr. Hareton to do things for her...I’m surprised he didn’t cook the dinners, too.”

“Mr. Ellis, _ men _don’t know how to cook, everyone knows that…” Thomas quipped, brightening at Ellis’s laugh. He started off again, Ellis at his side. “You at Escrick Hall today?”

“I was this morning, but they shoved me out early—there’s a luncheon party, so the roses’ll have to wait.”

Thomas nodded, indulging in some of the companionable silence he’d found he could share with Ellis. Every Thursday afternoon, Mrs. Jenkins went into to town to order up the next week’s ingredients, and Elsie was already off back home, which left Thomas quite alone for tea, unless Ellis stayed for it.

He usually did, and the quiet that sometimes fell over the servants’ hall never seemed tired with him around. 

It wasn’t the same as the constant chatter of Downton, but it felt nice, in its own way. 

“You posting some letters?” Ellis asked, bringing Thomas back to himself. “Box is back there.”

“Is it?” Thomas feigned surprise. “I’m all mixed up…well, I’ll get them posted on my way back...”

“I don’t mind,” Ellis said. 

As Thomas didn’t have a good reason for minding either, they were soon turned around and headed back towards the box.

“Are you summoning an army?” Ellis asked with a laugh.. 

“What?” Ellis indicated the stack of letters Thomas was carrying, and he felt his cheeks grow warm. “Oh…”

“For your friends back at Downton?” Ellis asked. “Elsie tells me you get a letter every other day, just about.”

In days long gone, Elsie would soon have had reason to regret her nosiness and loose lips. But Thomas was determined to be different, so he settled with: 

“Elsie exaggerates.” A try at a smile. Hands shaking as he put the letters through the slot. His stomach in knots as he wondered if they’d all be disappointed he wrote back.

Different. 

“Doesn’t look like she does,” Ellis said, still smiling—as he’d never met the old Thomas, he didn’t notice anything amiss. “Are you sorry to have left, then?”

Thomas shrugged, shoving his hands in his coat pockets. “It wouldn’t have been my choice. But Sir Mark is…well, I’m glad of the job.”

Different.

Ellis’s brow raised; he looked more amused than ever. 

“Glad of the money, at least…”

Thomas’s mouth twitched in the face of Ellis’s cheek. 

“Glad to settle into something,” he said, almost believing it was true.

Ellis didn’t seem nearly so convinced.

“Well, I’m glad to have you here,” he finally said. “Sometimes things get too settled.” 

Thomas wondered when _ that _ was supposed to happen. 

Like so many other things, it appeared to have skipped him.

* * *

**October, 1925**

Upstairs, Thomas’s sensibilities still chafed with boredom. Downstairs, however, he’d found respite from the unnerving quiet by the steady stream of letters from Downton. Letters he had to reply to, letters filled with stories that he took up to the dining room and played out in his mind. Letters that reassured him he mattered somewhere, even if he was stuck in a dreary, lifeless tomb of a house. 

And then there was Mr. Ellis, who seemed to linger longer over luncheon or tea each time he came into the servants’ hall. He too made Thomas feel grounded—like a thing of substance and weight. It hadn’t taken long for Thomas to stop reminding himself to be different when they were together—Mr. Ellis didn’t seem to like him any better when he held his tongue, or when he tripped over his first instinct. 

And if it wasn’t helping people to like him better, what was the point of stifling and second guessing everything he did? It was nicer—so much nicer—to let the back-and-forth between him and Ellis flow without impediment, to let his softness be soft and his sharpness be sharp without apologizing for either. 

Ellis seemed to prefer it that way as well, which meant Thomas could look forward to every Thursday afternoon at tea time. He could play the wireless without Mrs. Jenkins fussing over the volume, while Ellis sat in the servants’ hall with his tea, and they could talk of everything or nothing, as it suited them. 

“All these new dances…” Ellis said, turning the pages of one of Elsie’s magazines she kept in the servants’ hall so her children wouldn’t tear the pages before she’d gotten a chance to read it. “I can’t see how anyone keeps up…”

Thomas looked over his shoulder as he passed, a tray of biscuits in hand. 

“They’re easier than they look.” 

Ellis turned to look at him. “You dance, then?”

Something in the question made Thomas blush.

“I like to.”

Ellis had caught the distinction—Thomas could see it in his eyes—but he didn’t point it out. He turned his attention to the wireless and waited for Thomas to settle back into his seat.

“So what do you dance to this?” he asked, indicating the wireless. 

“A waltz, I should think.”

Ellis leaned over to take a biscuit. “I know that one, a bit.”

“Well, you’ve had about four hundred years to learn it,” Thomas quipped with a smile. 

Something in Ellis’s stare was making him lightheaded and warm, but before he could decide what to do about it, Ellis had turned back to his magazine. 

“I suppose it’s easy to laugh,” he said after a long pause. “After living in a big house with big parties…”

He was poking fun, and Thomas knew by now that constituted permission to return the favor. 

“You don’t ever go dancing in York?” he said. “There’s only a place on every corner…”

“No, I don’t,” Ellis replied. “And I’ll thank you not to tease me about it…”

“I’m not!”

Ellis’s lips twitched, his eyes falling back to his magazine. 

“Sounded like you were…”

His eyes didn’t move on the page, and a mad idea crossed Thomas’s mind. He clamped it down, shoved it to the back of his mind, because no matter what he felt about Ellis, he wasn’t doing _ that _ again...he’d move with certainty, or he wouldn’t move at all. 

“Elsie might teach you, if you ask her,” he said lightly. “She’s always complaining her husband doesn’t care too much for dancing.”

Ellis shot him a look of barely restrained disgust.

“As tempting as that sounds…” 

Thomas sighed. “Do you want to learn, or do you want to sulk?”

The silence between them lasted too long for Thomas to believe it was an accident. 

“I want to be asked, Mr. Barrow,” Ellis said.

Thomas swallowed—they’d taken rather a leap closer to certainty. 

“By?” he murmured. Any man with sense would know his meaning, but there was just enough innocence in it to keep him afloat if he was wrong (and _ God, _ he hoped he wasn’t wrong...didn’t think he could bear it, now it had come so close). 

Ellis raised an eyebrow, lips pressing together as he clamped down a grin. He knew. 

And now Thomas did, too. 

Ellis flipped a page in his magazine. 

“This is interesting…” he said, still not giving the words on the page more than a cursory glance. 

He’d meant it; he wanted to be asked, and Thomas wasn’t going to get anything from him until he worked up the nerve. 

“Do you want me to show you how it’s done, Mr. Ellis?” Voice bright and clear and direct, eyes up. A grin when Ellis looked at him. 

He knew how to do this part.

Ellis sat straight in his seat, smirking. “If it’s not too much trouble…”

“Now who’s teasing?” Thomas stood, holding out a hand that Ellis took in his own before standing. It wasn’t so rough as Thomas had thought it might be, working outside. And it was warm, warmer than Thomas remembered a person could be. 

He took a steadying breath. “So, if you’re leading…”

Ellis might have been exaggerating his incompetence, which Thomas could hardly blame him for—one had to find bait where they could. Besides, it was nicer, not having to worry about his toes being stepped on; dancing was nothing if not an excuse for two people to look at each other as close as they could standing up, and he didn’t want to spoil it by staring at his feet. 

The hand on Thomas’s shoulder blade pressed in every so often, each time they proved they could step together without mishap. Thomas moved closer at each prompting—people gave off warmth when they were close, even before anything touched. He’d almost forgotten.

They’d just mastered the rises and falls in the music when Ellis spoke, his voice low, face leaning in towards Thomas’s. 

“And what if I don’t want to lead?”

Thomas was glad of having something to hold on to. 

“Right,” he breathed. “Well, then your hands would go—that’s right. And you’ll start with going back on your—that’s it.”

It took a few steps for Thomas to realize that his hand now lay on Ellis’s shoulder blade, and then another few steps for him to find the wherewithal to take up Ellis’s role in nudging them closer together. And if it had been nice to be wanted..._ God_, it was something else to have someone smile like a fool at him wanting them. 

“So when do we spin?” Only a rare misstep revealed that Ellis was flustered in asking the question. Thomas made a show of wincing before pressing closer to him than ever, marveling at how he could see Ellis inhale sharply at his touch.

“Oh, we’ll spin,” Thomas murmured. “Right after you learn your right from your left, Mr. Ellis…”

* * *

**November, 1925**

Mr. Carson would have had kittens if he’d known Thomas was calling the head gardener by his first name—not even his _ proper _ first name. 

But Thomas was the butler of the estate, and he’d decided that it was patently silly to call a man he regularly kissed over tea, “Mr. Ellis.”

No one had called him Richard since his brief stint as a footman before the war (he’d despised it), and Dickie was reserved for his mother and a few of his aunts. His friends, Mr. Ellis said, called him Dick.

“If you don’t think it’s impertinent for me to call you one,” he said with a smile that Thomas interrupted with a kiss. 

If Thursday afternoons were nice with Mr. Ellis, they were still nicer with Dick, who sat close to him at the table, a hand in his own, or perhaps on Thomas’s knee. 

A few times, the thought of taking things out of the servants’ hall and to somewhere more private had crossed Thomas’s mind, but a fear of what it meant held him back from suggesting it, even when he could feel Dick hinting, nudging a bit closer, mouth pressing against his a bit longer. Just like when they danced; except this wasn’t dancing, and the ending was bound to be messy. Ruinous, even, if Thomas couldn’t find a way to manage things right. 

It would come to a head eventually—there was no need to hasten the journey to the cliffside. He was happier than he’d ever thought he’d be again, and if he had to trudge to enjoy it, he would. 

“What are these?” Dick set his cup down, reaching for a colorful stack of papers sitting in the middle of the table. Thomas smiled. 

“They’re from the children,” he said. “Lady Mary says the nannies have had to take to locking up the crayons to keep them away from the nursery walls…”

Dick moved through the stack of drawings—Miss Marigold’s purple scribbles and swirls, Master George’s bubblelike farm renderings, Miss Sybbie’s carefully formed diamonds and trapezoids (and one octagon, filled in triumphantly with a smiling face). 

“Must make you happy, to know they’re thinking of you,” he said. 

He wasn’t wrong—it moved Thomas to no end that he still received letters from anyone back at Downton, the children most of all. 

But they’d have to forget him sometime—the children especially. And one day, the scribbles of farmhouses and happy faces would be all he had. 

“Happy’s one word,” he said, feeling ill and somehow horrendously ungrateful. 

“You might find your way back there,” Dick said, understanding the melancholy that lay behind the pictures. “And in the meantime, you can look forward to having lovely pictures of a…”

He turned one of George’s pictures in hand, brow knitting in confusion. 

“Lady Mary says it’s a pig,” Thomas explained, pointing out the (rather differently sized) ears. “Master George wants to be a pig man, like Mr. Mason.”

“Ah,” Dick said, finally catching the general idea of the piece. “Well it’s round, he’s got that bit. I suppose those are piglets?”

He laughed to himself, so fondly Thomas thought he might burst. 

He’d have to tell him, before it got too far for Thomas to carry it any more. 

“What’s the matter?” Dick had looked up from the picture, the amusement gone from his face. Thomas wondered if he looked as faint as he suddenly felt. 

“There’s something I should tell you…” Thomas began. “Well, it’s more that I _ have _to tell you, really…”

A chill was creeping up neck, an icy-hot dread at speaking his past into existence in this space.

“Take your time,” Dick said. 

Against his first instinct to push it all out on the table, Thomas did. The whole thing took them nearly to Mrs. Jenkins’s arrival—with its stops and starts and moments where Thomas thought he’d have to crawl out of his skin before it was all over—but when it was over, when Thomas took his first breath free of it, he felt a comforting sense of weight return to his body. 

“You’re all right,” Dick said. He’d put a hand on Thomas’s shoulder—Thomas couldn’t remember when—and it squeezed him just enough for Thomas to believe what he’d said.

“I didn’t tell you because I want you to worry,” he said, not quite looking him in the eye. Dick nodded.

“Would you tell me if I had to worry?” His hand moved up from Thomas’s shoulder, across to the hair on the nape of his neck. Thomas closed his eyes, afraid of the smile that crossed his lips at the sensation. 

“I think I would,” he said upon opening his eyes. Because he _ had _ to after saying something like that, Thomas met Dick’s gaze. 

That made the smile worse.

“And now’s not one of those times?” Dick asked, though he was smiling as well.

“No,” Thomas said, meaning it more than he’d realized even a few minutes before. “Now is...better and better, as a matter of fact.”

“But you still miss Downton?”

Thomas looked at the drawings still sprawled on the table, thought of the letters he kept bundled in his bedside table drawers. 

“I do, there’s no denying that. I try to take the good from what I have now...but sometimes I’m too tired to manage it.”

“So how do you rest up for next time?” Dick asked. 

Thomas considered the question. 

“I’m think still learning that part.”

It felt frightening to admit, until he saw the evenness in Dick’s face. 

“Can I help?”

Thomas leaned forward, letting their faces fall into each other’s shadows. 

“You already do.”

* * *

**December 31st, 1925**

He’d spent however many months wishing he could be back at Downton, praying for some miracle that would land him back in his old room, at his old seat at the table in the servants’ hall—a table that was always full. He’d spent the whole of Lady Edith’s service and the better part of the past few hours upstairs waiting for the chance to slip downstairs and see the world that had been his for so many years. 

And then Lord Grantham had gone and spoiled it by cornering him about taking over for Carson. 

Thomas still couldn’t remember what he’d managed to stammer, but it hadn’t been the ‘yes, of course,’ they’d been expecting. 

Now, his tumble down the familiar stairs was marred by the fear that Mrs. Hughes and Mr. Carson had beaten him down, that they had told everyone how Thomas had done exactly what everyone expected he’d do—balked at the chance to be helpful, sneered at the offer to come back. Thrown their generosity and patience back in their faces. Because that’s what Thomas Barrow did—and how could they expect anything different? 

It would be over, then. Completely and entirely over.

“Mr. Barrow!” Miss Baxter met him at the bottom of the stairs. “Is it true?”

Thomas blanched. 

“I don’t…”

“About Anna?” Baxter pressed. “Is she having her baby?”

Thomas blinked. “I—yes, yes, I think I heard someone upstairs say something…”

“It’s so exciting you’ll be here for it!” She beamed at him as openly as she always had—Thomas would never forget what that meant—and he allowed himself a moment of relief at the fact that all had not been poisoned yet. 

“Is that Mr. Barrow at last?” Mrs. Patmore could be heard from the kitchen. “Daisy, go and see!” 

“Down here for three seconds…” Thomas said with a laugh.

“They’ve missed you,” Baxter said, but there was a spark in her eye that suggested he was in for more than a ‘hello, good to see you.’

He hadn’t made it halfway to the kitchens before running into Mrs. Hughes, who thanked him so warmly for his help upstairs that Thomas thought he might sink into the floor. 

“I was glad to do it,” he said, hoping she could hear it as truthfully as he meant it. “And I—”

“—I know,” she said softly, the warmth in her voice undiminished. “But hope we’ll see more of you in the New Year.”

“I—”

“Is he here?” Daisy shouted, hurrying towards them. “Only, Mr. Ellis is waiting in the kitchen—”

Mrs. Patmore’s head was poking into the hall before Daisy could finish her next breath. 

“Daisy! It’s meant to be a surprise!”

“It_ has _ been, all this time!” Daisy retorted. “He’s not five steps away, so I don’t see what difference it makes, now...hello, Thomas!”

Thomas stared past her towards the kitchen. “Did you say…?”

“It were Anna’s idea,” Daisy said, leading the way. “She’ll be so disappointed she missed it...you’ll have to tell her it was _ such _ a surprise…”

Which would hardly be a lie, Thomas thought as they turned into the kitchen where—sure enough—Dick stood next to Mrs. Patmore, who was still busy piling trays with desserts. 

“How—?”

“We were all jealous of Mr. Barrow’s new friend,” Andy said, swiping up one of the trays. “Wanted to make sure he wasn’t putting us all to shame.”

“And we’ve gotten what we asked for, didn’t we?” Mrs. Patmore laughed. Dick, who was red in the cheeks at seeing Thomas, stepped forward.

“How long did you know about this?” Thomas said softly, knowing his grin was giving everything away, and somehow not caring. 

“I think I received my invitation about a week after yours,” Dick said; now that he had Thomas’s approval, he looked bursting with excitement. 

“Are you glad I’ve come?” he said, though he couldn’t possibly believe Thomas would say anything but yes…

“I am,” Thomas said. “And there’s something I need to speak to you about—something that just happened.”

Dick raised an eyebrow. “Something besides the ladies’ maid giving birth in the upstairs bedroom?”

“Nothing quite that exciting, but yes…” Thomas said, hurrying him into the yard before they could be stopped by everyone he’d ever known. 

It was too cold to be outside, really, but there would be nowhere else quiet enough tonight, and Thomas couldn’t sit with the news any longer. 

“They’ve asked me to be butler,” he said as soon as the door shut. “Mr. Carson can’t manage it anymore, and they’ve asked me.”

“That’s lucky,” Dick said with a grin.

“Is it?” Thomas looked past Dick at one of the sheds—how many hours had he pressed his back against one, holding a cigarette, hoping to go anywhere else (_ be _ anyone else, if he’d let even his deepest hopes be honest in those days…)?

“Thomas.” Dick took his hand. “All you’ve been thinking of these past months is this place. And now you can come back, and you’re not sure if you should?”

Thomas could practically feel the bitterness that still radiated off the wall where he’d stood each day—how had he managed it so long, going on in that way? 

“I missed my chance,” he said blankly. “I had my time, and I didn’t make the most of it. I’m sorry for it now, but there’s nothing to be done.”

“Nothing to be done?” Dick scoffed. “What do you call being offered a job?”

The old Thomas would have snatched it up without question, pulling the title on tight over an ill-fitting form, bullying it and himself and everyone who looked askance until it almost all fit together. 

He couldn’t do it again—_wouldn’t _ do it again. 

“Coming back doesn’t change the past.”

Dick squeezed his hand. “Neither will avoiding it.” 

“I don’t avoid it,” Thomas said, in a tone that bordered on a snap. 

“You know it won’t change anything between us?” Dick murmured. “If you take it?”

Of course—Dick didn’t see the figure by the shed. Or the sneering one in the hall and the kitchens. The ones in the attics who wept and trembled and felt cold all the time. 

If he could, he’d have understood. He’d have told Thomas to run as fast as he could, for fear they might overtake him again, make him ugly and unloving and unloved all over.

“But it will,” he whispered, throat tight. 

Dick stepped closer. “Only in good ways.”

“Dick…”

“It’s true,” he said, so certainly that Thomas looked over at the shed again, as if afraid of retribution from the shadow that lingered there. To his surprise, it seemed to have disappeared. 

“You want to be here.” Dick said. “I want you here. _ They _ want you here.”

And he spoke not of the shadows, but of the real people chattering all through the house. People who had called him here because he was dear to Thomas, and that _ mattered _ to them. 

Thomas stared at him with wide eyes, and Dick smiled as he stepped closer. 

“And as you can see…” he murmured, taking Thomas’s cheek in hand. “I’ve no trouble getting here, so there’s nothing to worry about on that score.” 

Thomas leaned into the kiss with his mind half made up to go back upstairs and tell Lord Grantham he’d decided after all. 

The back door creaked as it shut. 

Lady Mary had saved him the trouble of a trip upstairs. 

Thomas opened and shut his mouth as if gasping for air—he didn’t dare look at Dick to see what he was doing. 

“Please don’t apologize, it’s my fault for pushing in…” Lady Mary said, pulling her coat tighter around her as she stepped towards them, already recovered from the shock Thomas swore he’d seen on her face. “Anyway, I’m glad we don’t have to be bothered with tip-toeing. I’ve never been much good at it.”

Dick stepped forward. “Milady, it’s not what—”

“—no?” Lady Mary said—and, oh, Thomas had forgotten how razor sharp her voice could get. “You’re_ not _ the gardener Anna says they’ve heard so much about in Barrow’s letters?”

Thomas would have been bowled over if it were him, but Dick hardly blinked. 

“I’m sure he never wrote anything like what you seem to be suggest—”

Lady Mary rolled her eyes. “—oh, let’s not be ridiculous about this…?” 

“—Ellis,” Dick supplied.

“Ellis, of course,” Lady Mary said, as if they were upstairs in the drawing room and talking of nothing more interesting than whatever had been discussed at the last dinner party. “Well, Ellis, the fact of the matter is that we’ve all known about Barrow for years, and I hope you won’t think me indelicate for saying that if anyone here wanted to make a thing of it, this is hardly the first opportunity that’s presented itself.”

Dick had nothing to say to that—he looked back at Thomas in puzzlement. Thomas stepped forward.

“You wanted to see me, milady?” 

“I did. I was rather put out by your hesitancy to take His Lordship’s offer. Actually, I was more confused than anything—I never got the impression you enjoyed it at Sir Mark’s. Then I remembered the gardener,” Lady Mary’s head nodded in Dick’s direction, “and it all came together.”

Thomas straightened. “Did it, milady?”

“Of course.” Lady Mary spoke with the assurance of someone who had taken the whole matter apart before speaking. “You’ve found someone to be fond of and settled into a routine with that someone. Coming back to Downton disrupts that routine, and you’re questioning whether what you’ve built can survive it.”

Which wasn’t it, not really...but Thomas wasn’t about to argue with Lady Mary.

“It must seem a trivial concern to you, but—”

“—far from it. You have to hold tight to as much as you can in this world, for as long as you can. But Barrow, surely you don’t imagine Sir Mark’s estate providing the..._ accommodations _it currently does for much longer?” She fixed them both with a pointed stare. “Apart from anything else, he and Lady Stiles are about three steps from the grave, and who will take on the estate then?”

Thomas looked at Dick, who seemed interested in an especially large stone next to the work bench. 

“I don’t know, milady.”

“Exactly,” Lady Mary said. “It’s an aging house, with no clear future. Whatever you build there is just as likely to collapse the next day. Downton has a future well in hand, if we can be clever about it, and an heir who will grow up ready to take the moon down for you. How can there be any question of where you should go?”

“I’ve told him that, milady,” Dick said, smiling at Thomas.

Lady Mary looked surprised—perhaps she’d imagined Richard Ellis to be the culprit all along. “Have you? Then I’m quite convinced Barrow will be made to see sense.”

“And you don’t think it might be awkward?” Thomas asked, unsure of who he was really seeking an answer from. “Coming back after leaving, being in charge of it all?” 

“Why should it be?” Lady Mary said without hesitation. “Someone has to take the job. And they know you, they know your style.”

Thomas dared a glance towards the shed. 

“Well that’s...that’s part of the trouble,” he admitted. “I didn’t always lead with the right foot, while I was here.” 

Lady Mary paused at this—she couldn’t very well pretend she didn’t know he spoke the truth. But she recovered—Lady Mary always did.

“All I know is that everyone was pleased as punch you’d be turning up today,” she said. “And you won’t help anyone by turning into a timid shadow—least of all yourself. None of us want a trembling Mr. Barrow, do we, Ellis?”

Dick smiled. “No, milady.” 

“You see?” Lady Mary lifted her chin. “And I can’t promise anything now, but Henson is getting on, and I doubt he’ll get through another spring without handing in his notice. So I can put in a word, if there are any gardeners looking to make a move…”

She grinned at Dick’s shocked silence. Lady Mary never did anything by halves…

“He puts up in the village, does a few of the other surrounding estates,” she continued. “I think he does rather well for himself. But perhaps you like Escrick—I’m told it’s charming.”

“Nothing too precious,” Dick quipped. Lady Mary smirked.

“I thought not. Well, I’d better see to Anna..” she stopped on her heel, swiveling back around. “Oh, she’s had the baby, didn’t I say? We got off to rather a different start than I’d expected…” She very nearly laughed, before appearing to think better of it. “Well, anyway, it’s a boy. _ He’s _a boy, I should say.”

Thomas was more pleased by the news than he’d thought possible even a few months before. 

“Everything’s all right, then?” 

“Absolutely perfect, Bates is over the moon,” Lady Mary said. “You’ll give me your answer soon then, Barrow? Only I want Carson to feel it's settled.” 

“Milady…” Thomas said as she turned to leave. “I’ll do it.”

She didn’t look at all surprised, which Thomas might have found infuriating, in a different time. 

Now, her sureness only settled his remaining anxieties.

“George will be quite pleased.”

And as the door clicked shut behind her, that seemed more than enough. 

“She’s something…” Dick murmured, before looking back at Thomas, a grin on his face. “Will you let me be happy for you, now?” 

Thomas let him take his hands, but he resisted Dick pulling him closer. 

“Will you come to Downton in the spring?” he teased.

Dick laughed. “Do you have to ask?” 

He pulled harder, and Thomas let himself step forward into his arms. 

“We should go inside,” he whispered. “They’ll want to gawk at you some more.” 

Dick nodded, edging closer as he took Thomas’s cheek in hand once again. 

“We’d better have our New Year’s kiss early, then.”

And though Thomas was glad of the warmth in the servants’ hall as the clock struck midnight, and grateful for the smiles that awaited him, he knew it was the moment in the cold that had decided him, that had given him permission to come back. 

Dick raised a knowing glass in his direction as the singing began, and Thomas didn’t know or care if he was different or better or on the right foot. Perhaps he’d care again in the morning...or perhaps he wouldn’t.

Thomas suspected happy people didn’t think on such things as much. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who read and commented on and supported this story!! It means so much to me, and I couldn’t be more excited by the response. Thank you!
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this final part, and I’m looking forward to doing some other things with Thomas/Richard in the future!

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! One of the fun parts of this format is that what happens next to this Richard/Thomas is up to you! We'll start the next chapter with a New Entrance for Richard...this time in Season 2.


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